I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart?

Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

If you would civilize a man, begin with his grandmother.

Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.

All that was neither a city, nor a church, nor a river, nor color, nor light, nor shadow: it was reverie. For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.