To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

...you will do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end except that the old is less militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts.

One's neighbor is always the enemy. That is the nature of things.

The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small 'yes' at the center of a vast 'no'.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

U.S. certainly are not warlike. We don't want that. We want to make money, which I always thought was one of the most admirable things about Americans.