Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.