The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.
What is a historian? Someone who doesn’t write well enough to work on a daily.
A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
An idea’s birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.
Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.
A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram.
Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.
Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.
Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.
To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.
Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.
That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there – and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.
To me it’s still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.
Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.
A father’s pride, laid on thick, has always made me wish that the fellow had at least experienced some pain during procreation.
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.