All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.

Fame! In the best of cases, a misunderstanding.

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.

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.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

I love my country too much to be a nationalist.

In the midst of winter, I finally learned there was in me an invisible summer.

I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.

It is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

Love can burn or love can last but not both.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.

Those who lack courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

Without work all life goes rotten.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.