Contemporaries live from second hand to mouth.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

Barbershop conversations are irrefutable proof that heads exist for the sake of hair.

The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long. The world needed a discoverer of the North Pole, and in all areas of social activity, merit was less important here than opportunity.

You don't even live once.

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.