Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

Yes, that's right... love should come before logic ... Only then will man come to understand the meaning of life.

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.

I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.