Strong drink stupefies a man and makes it possible for him to forget; it gives him an artificial cheeriness, an artificial excitement; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilization and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined.

The people is always expressive of the truth. The life of a people cannot be a lie.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.

Never was Catholicism, never were the ideas of chivalry, impressed on men so deeply, so multifariously, as the bourgeois ideas.