Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?