Fear is the start of wisdom.

I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading me, grasping me; because I possess an inner consciousness of a particular providence and of a universal mind that marks out for me the course of my own destiny.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.

We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.