Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.
At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.
I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.
he's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.
I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.
I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.
Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
When I see a new face, something sets off an alarm bell inside me. 'slow down! Danger!' Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
After all, I do not have so many ways of proving that I am free. We is always free at the expense of someone else. It is a bother,but it is normal.
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.