I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.