“Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.”

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

In Paris, everything’s for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy – love which creates life?

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

The conclusion does not belong to the artist.

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

Who tricked you into believing another person was meant to complete you when the most they can do is a compliment.

It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world – a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one – is to fix yourself.

It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, somebody of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.