“It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.”

A thousand words can’t make the mark a single deed will leave.

It is no use lying to one’s self.

Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.

I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less.

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Each bird must sing with his own throat.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.

Everything that I have written is closely related to something that I have lived through.

Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

I hold that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

Look into any man’s heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

I found with my students they don’t necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what’s relevant to what’s he doing you see.

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.

A journal should be neither an echo nor a pander.

Every journalist owes tribute to the evil one.

If you are looking for a kindly, well-to-do older gentleman who is no longer interested in sex, take out an ad in The Wall Street Journal.

To do that I knew I had to learn French. In order to practice I started to write journals in French. The effort I made to master what I regarded a bad thing – a language owned by the rich Moroccans – brought me the ability to write.

Lost journals are steps back home, like the mending of broken bones, like scars that act as patches to my soul, like the measurement marks on my mother’s wall that show just how much I’ve grown.

She journaled frequently – what did I learn from this particular situation in relation to myself. These question helped her understand herself much better.