Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.