God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!

When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!

Hell, madame, is to love no longer.

...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.