Quote collection
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"But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination."
"Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature."
"But above all, in order to be, never try to seem."
"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
"I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?"
"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"
"It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life."
"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
"Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes."
"I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards."
"Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty."
"If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us."
"I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions."
"...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself."
"There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman."
"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."
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
"The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men."
"Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."