Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.
Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.
Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.
To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.
Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.
The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.
To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.
There are intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
albinos aren't reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair, why should they hold it again me for being a lesbian? It's a question of nature: my queerness isn't a vice, isn't 'deliberate,' and harms no one.
All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves. This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth, for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live on beyond themselves.
We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?
When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.
Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.