Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.

Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.