To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.