Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.