As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

I like a girl with a substantial bottom, ' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.

If not me then who? Confront evil!

Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you do hold well.

The only politics in this country that's relevant to black people today is the politics of revolution... none other.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.

Every weapon system has been gutted.

Often times, I'm surprised by what I'm writing or what I'm playing, and then that inspires me to keep going with it, so it ends up being a very adventurous process.

It is up to the government to keep the government's secrets.