The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.

Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.