Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.
I told myself ‘Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.
This notary was a little man, completely round, round in every part. His head looked like a ball nailed onto another ball, supported by two legs that were so tiny and so short that they also closely resembled balls.
Then, as the priest was emerging somewhat uneasily from his lair, he went straight up to him, looked deep into his eyes, and growled into his face: ‘If you weren’t wearing skirts, what a punch I’d give you right on your ugly snout, wouldn’t I just!
They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.
Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.
You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
Life is a slope. As long as you’re going up you’re always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It’s slow going up and quick going down.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.
Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.
Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food.