Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.