Quote collection
252 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it."
"An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies."
"I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance."
"Please do not understand me too quickly."
"Though a revolution may call itself "national," it always marks the victory of a single party."
"The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them."
"Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them."
"One is always wrong to open a conversation with the devil, for, however he goes about it, he always insists upon having the last word."
"It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age."
"Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend."
"You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else."
"Nothing is good for everyone, but only relatively to some people."
"The truth is, I hoped the cure would dislike me. I tried to think of disagreeable things to say to him -- I could hit on nothing that wasn't charming. It's wonderful how hard I find it not to be fascinating."
"Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered."
"An unprejudiced mind is probably the rarest thing in the world; to nonprejudice I attach the greatest value."
"Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain."
"We no longer admit any other truth than that which is expedient; for there is no worse error than the truth that may weaken the arm that is fighting."
"To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save."
"Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?"
"The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it."