All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.