Love is the cheapest of religions.

The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

There are eyes in the sea; sometimes they gleam.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking—as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit—one might as well be dead.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

All years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

Not believing in anything is also a religion.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

All our "most sacred affections" are merely prosaic habit.

Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.

The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.

Work alone isn't enough for me and mine;

we know how to break our backs, but the great dream

Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

You wait for nothing

if not for the word

that will burst from the deep

like a fruit among branches.

Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.

Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself.

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

Death will come and it will have your eyes.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

To despise money, one must have plenty of it.

There is something indecent in words.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

Don't mix wine and women.

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.

Now that I've seen what war is ... I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.

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