Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.

Love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises.

A few people of integrity can go a long way.

The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.

It's easy to get people's attention, what counts is getting their interest.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow real poverty.

There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment.

I think we can leave mullets back in the '80s. I'm really not a big fan of them.

Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud.

Humanity looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny.