A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
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.
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
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.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
We are all special cases.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.