Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.