To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?