We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.