“At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.”

The world is the house of the strong.

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

In order to get as much fame as one’s father one has to much more able than he.

Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.

There are cats and cats.

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.

I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush.

I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.

The ones I am going to have to really work hard on early in the game to get what I want.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

If you are not going to produce albums then you are not going to produce new fans. It’s impossible.

I’m a huge believer in putting music out as quickly as early as possible.

I don’t mind being 65, but nobody is gonna tell me to come in at 5:30 to have the early bird special.