“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”

Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.

Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.

Life is a sum of all your choices. So, what are you doing today?

I love life – that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.

I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.

Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

Science is the most reliable guide for civilization, for life, for success in the world. Searching a guide other than the science is meaning carelessness, ignorance and heresy.

Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.

It was very relaxing to be away from civilization, and this bothered me. I should not have found the loneliness so welcoming.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?