"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

"We call first truths those we discover after all the others."

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question."

"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."

"It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting."

"To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady."

"Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children."

"Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."

"Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."

"Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

"Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without."

"Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day."

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

"Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity."

"The society based on production is only productive, not creative."

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books."

"Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."

"To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love."

"For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium."

"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead."

"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."

"Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love."

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."

"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door."

"The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody."

"Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators."

"There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change."

"Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never."

"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves."

"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."

"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude."

"How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."

"The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves."

"Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future."

"Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence."

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."

"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death."

"At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things."

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."

"Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions."

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

"The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm."