Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

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.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

People have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these two judgments.