I love those who do not know how to live for today.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.