The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.”]
If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
….and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.
Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.
…A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.
Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.
Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
I said, ‘If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago?
Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.
I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.
Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
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.
Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipw
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governm
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.
Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.
What you love too violently finishes by killing you.
The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.
O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature.
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – pale ale and revolution – and assuredly he could not taste the one without dreaming of the other.
There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing
And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable.
Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.
Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.
I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder
After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.
Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.
Patriotism is a kind of religion it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
Patriotism is a kind of religion it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.
The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.