A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
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.
You always get exaggerated notions about things you don't know anything about.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
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.
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.
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering.
Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.
To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
