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.
The little stations are very proud because the expresses have to pass them by.
Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
A man’s eroticism is a woman’s sexuality.
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.
Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.
Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?