"Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content."

"Love is being stupid together."

"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."

"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best."

"Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to."

"Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh."

"A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone."

"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well."

"Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows."

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us."

"The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds."

"God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly."

"An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it."

"A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts."

"A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas."

"Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken."

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

"To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts."

"A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key."

"Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious."

"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."

"A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others."

"History is the science of things which are not repeated."

"Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business."

"Politeness is organized indifference."

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."

"Power without abuse loses its charm."

"The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect."