We all have a weakness for beauty.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

This is the century of fear.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.