Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.

Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.