I believe that in every circumstance I have been able to see rather clearly the most advantageous course I could follow, which is very rarely the one I did follow.
Actions whose motives he cannot understand that is, actions not prompted by the hope of profit.
Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.
The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.
Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say - because they were too obvious.
I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.
If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
Atheism. There is not a single exalting and emancipating influence that does not in turn become inhibitory.
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
Whither should we aim if not towards God?
It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.
The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it.
Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.
Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
The abominable effort to take one’s sins with one to paradise.
To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.
We no longer admit any other truth than that which is expedient; for there is no worse error than the truth that may weaken the arm that is fighting.
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