If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.

I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.

Those authors into whose hands nature has placed a magic wand, with which they no sooner touch us than we forget the unhappiness in life, than the darkness leaves our soul, and we are reconciled to existence, should be placed among the benefactors of the human race.

If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.

There comes a moment during which almost every girl or boy falls into melancholy; they are tormented by a vague inquietude which rests on everything and finds nothing to calm it. They seek solitude; they weep; the silence to be found in cloister attracts them: the image of peace that seems to reign in religious houses seduces them. They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.