“One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.”

I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots.

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz , one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.

To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly.

Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.

No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

One of the interesting things to me is that God grows throughout the Old Testament. He evolves, sort of matures, and becomes kinder.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and has nothing to do with the public area… the performance of the work one creates.

Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

Water each other through dialogue, shared pain, moments – we grow as one tree.