Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

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

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.

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