The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.