If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

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.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

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?

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.