Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve a victory over other people, you will conquer yourself.

There is an illusion of central position, justifying one's own purposes as right and everybody else¹s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, imperfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos--and what makes their situation almost hopeless is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health.

He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed; out distanced, crushed; he who ceases t grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end.