Quote collection
187 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls."
"Only the bad man is alone."
"Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging."
"A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced."
"There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint."
"There is only one passion, the passion for happiness."
"To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly."
"Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence."
"Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common."
"My ideas are my whores."
"Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control."
"Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' This stranger is a theologian."
"First move me, astonish me, break my heart, let me tremble, weep, stare, be enraged-only then regale my eyes."
"The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice."
"The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed."
"You have to make it happen."
"To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."
"The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion."
"Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."
"Une danse est un poe' me. A dance is a poem."