We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

Where there is no hope, we must invent it.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.