“People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.”

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

Whatever one may do, one is always alone in the world.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.

Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that is left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.

Determination. To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream. Not only plan, but also believe.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?

I am not a fatalist. I have just been reading War and Peace and Tolstoy is such a fatalist. I think people can make a difference, I am an optimist who worries a lot.

The masses are asses.

Money is never to be squandered or spent ostentatiously. Some of the greatest people in history have lived lives of the greatest simplicity.

Sedentary people are apt to have sluggish minds. A sluggish mind is apt to be reflected in flabbiness of body and in a dullness of expression that invites no interest and gets none.

I’m one of the most fortunate people in the world.

George Bush has met more foreign heads of state than I have. But a substantial number of them were dead.

People like to say don’t abort, adopt. But I’m saying don’t strip, scholarship.