Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.