Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.