Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

You must promise me. You can't desire the end without desiring the means.' Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

Failure too is a form of death.

Death was far more certain than God.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?