What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.

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.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

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!

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.