“Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.”

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.

It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.

Every good act is charity. A man’s true wealth hereafter is the good that he does in this world to his fellows.

Those whose conduct gives room for talk are always the first to attack their neighbors.

No matter what everybody says, ultimately these things can harm us only by the way we react to them.

Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.

The public scandal is what constitutes the offence: sins sinned in secret are no sins at all.

I would like to be like my father and all the rest of my ancestors who never married.

The road is a long one from the projection of a thing to its accomplishment.

The less we deserve good fortune, the more we hope for it.

At least it’s better to be married than to be dead.

Most people die from the remedy rather than from the illness.

I have a heart to love all the world; and like Alexander I wish there were yet other worlds, so I could carry even further my amorous conquests.

The smallest errors are always the best.

As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.

You don’t go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that’s benign conquest. It’s a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else’s being you can’t be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.

I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the film industry.

Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

I don’t know why it is that we need to denigrate, to knock down. It’s so sick.

Foreigners cannot bring freedom, cannot bring democracy, because this is related to the culture, to the different factors that affect or influence that society. You cannot bring it, you cannot import it.