How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
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.
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
