Playwrights from France

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity. I am at ease in my generation."

"One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines."

"Everything is only a dream."

"Paris flared — Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice."

"Dreyfus is innocent. I swear it! I stake my life on it — my honor! At this solemn moment, in the presence of this tribunal which is the representative of human justice, before you, gentlemen of the jury, who are the very incarnation of the country, before the whole of France, before the whole world, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. By my forty years of work, by the authority that this toil may have given me, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. By all I have now, by the name I have made for myself, by my works which have helped for the expansion of French literature, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. May all that melt away, may my works perish if Dreyfus be not innocent! He is innocent. All seems against me — the two Chambers, the civil authority, the military authority, the most widely-circulated journals, the public opinion which they have poisoned. And I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor."

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud!"

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."

"A writer of great talent, to whom I complained of the little sympathy I have met with, made me this profound answer: "You have an immense fault which will close all doors against you: you cannot converse for two minutes with a fool without showing him that he is one.""

"The critics greeted this book with a churlish and horrified outcry. Certain virtuous people, in newspapers no less virtuous, made a grimace of disgust as they picked it up with the tongs to throw it into the fire. Even the minor literary reviews, the ones that retail nightly the tittle-tattle from alcoves and private rooms, held their noses and talked of filth and stench. I am not complaining about this reception; on the contrary I am delighted to observe that my colleagues have such maidenly susceptibilities."

"Thérèse, residing in damp obscurity, in gloomy, crushing silence, saw life expand before her in all its nakedness, each night bringing the same cold couch, and each morn the same empty day."

"Thérèse could not find one human being, not one living being among these grotesque and sinister creatures, with whom she was shut up; sometimes she had hallucinations, she imagined herself buried at the bottom of a tomb, in company with mechanical corpses, who, when the strings were pulled, moved their heads, and agitated their legs and arms."

"The only ambition of this great powerful frame was to do nothing, to grovel in idleness and satiation from hour to hour. He wanted to eat well, sleep well, to abundantly satisfy his passions, without moving from his place, without running the risk of the slightest fatigue."

"She made a savage, angry effort at revolt, and, then all at once gave in. They exchanged not a word. The act was silent and brutal."

"They have stifled me with their middle-class gentleness, and I can hardly understand how it is that there is still blood in my veins. I have lowered my eyes, and given myself a mournful, idiotic face like theirs. I have led their deathlike life."

"The young woman seemed to take pleasure in being bold and shameless. She had no hesitation, no fear whatsoever. She threw herself into adultery with a sort of vigorous sincerity, defying danger and doing so with a sort of vanity in her defiance."

"Elle aimait ce garçon de cette tendresse bavarde que les vieilles femmes ont pour les gens qui viennent de leur pays, apportant avec eux des souvenirs du passé."

"La nature et les circonstances semblaient avoir fait cette femme pour cet homme, et les avoir poussés l'un vers l'autre."

"C'était comme un éclair de passion, rapide et aveuglant, dans un ciel mort."

"Il a besoin de cette femme pour vivre comme on a besoin de boire et de manger."

"L'idée de la mort, jetée avec désespoir entre deux baisers, revenait implacable et aiguë."

"Parfois, ils se forçaient à l’espérance, ils cherchaient à reprendre les rêves brûlants d’autrefois, et ils demeuraient tout étonnés, en voyant que leur imagination était vide."

"When they seated themselves in their carriage, they seemed to be greater strangers than before."

"The sort of remorse Laurent experienced was purely physical. His body, his irritated nerves and trembling frame alone were afraid of the drowned man. His conscience was for nothing in his terror. He did not feel the least regret at having killed Camille. When he was calm, when the spectre did not happen to be there, he would have committed the murder over again, had he thought his interests absolutely required it."

"In the sudden change that had come over her heart, she no longer recognised herself."

"Nothing could be more heartrending than this mute and motionless despair."

"For Madame Raquin, there was such a fathomless depth in this thought, that she could neither reason it out, nor grasp it clearly. She experienced but one sensation, that of a horrible disaster; it seemed to her that she was falling into a dark, cold hole. And she said to herself: "I shall be smashed to pieces at the bottom.""

"She would have cursed the Almighty had she been able to shout out a blasphemy. Providence had deceived her for over sixty years, by treating her as a gentle, good little girl, by amusing her with lying representations of tranquil joy. And she had remained a child, senselessly believing in a thousand silly things, and unable to see life as it really is, dragging along in the sanguinary filth of passions. Providence was bad; it should have told her the truth before, or have allowed her to continue in her innocence and blindness. Now, it only remained for her to die, denying love, denying friendship, denying devotedness. Nothing existed but murder and lust."

"Au fond une pensée unique les rongeait: ils s’irritaient contre leur crime, ils se désespéraient d’avoir à jamais troublé leur vie."

"Like certain devotees, who fancy they will deceive the Almighty, and secure pardon by praying with their lips, and assuming the humble attitude of penitence, Thérèse displayed humility, striking her chest, finding words of repentance, without having anything at the bottom of her heart save fear and cowardice."

"After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy."

"He knew that henceforth, all his days would resemble one another, and bring him equal suffering. And he saw the weeks, months and years gloomily and implacably awaiting him, coming one after the other to fall upon him and gradually smother him."

"Lorsque l'avenir est sans espoir, le présent prend une amertume ignoble."

"The couple fell one atop of the other, struck down, finding consolation, at last, in death."

"When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating."

"The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to plunder and steal."

"... il y avait en elle un manque d'équilibre entre le sang et les nerfs, une sorte de détraquement du cerveau et du cœur, qui la faisait vivre en dehors de la vie ordinaire, autrement que tout le monde."

"From that time onwards he seemed to feel out of place in Plassans. He would wander through the streets like a lost soul. At last he made a sudden decision, and left for Paris."

"Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassans sleeps while Paris fights."

"A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure. It will be a good thing for the Rougon family to be founded on a massacre, like many illustrious families."

"Ce fut un naïf, un naïf sublime, resté sur le seuil du temple, à genoux devant des cierges qu’il prenait de loin pour des étoiles."

"When lovers kiss on the cheeks, it is because they are searching, feeling for one another’s lips. Lovers are made by a kiss."

"Prends garde, mon garçon, on en meurt."

"They kissed each other again and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, staring unblinkingly at the pale, slumbering couple, who now reeked of crime under their sheets, and were dreaming that they could see blood raining down in big drops and turning into gold coins as they landed on the floor."

"For a moment he thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild, satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood."

"Puis le moment de la séparation sonnait, Miette remontait sur son mur. Elle lui envoyait des baisers. Et il ne la voyait plus. Une émotion terrible le prit à la gorge: il ne la verrait plus jamais, jamais."

"Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark growths, these colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hotbed, of this forest growth, of this mass of vegetation aglow with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with disturbing odours. ... But amid this strange music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids' pungency, was the penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, the smell of lovemaking escaping in the early morning from the bedroom of newlyweds."

"Etre pauvre à Paris, c'est être pauvre deux fois."

"She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself."

"The Empire had just been proclaimed, after that famous journey during which the Prince President had succeeded in arousing the enthusiasm of some Bonapartist departments. Silence reigned both at the tribune and in the press. Society, saved once more, was congratulating itself and indolently resting, now that a strong government was protecting it and relieving it even of the trouble of thinking and of attending to its own business."

"The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness."

"He was twenty, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most extreme forms of debauchery. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth."

"Those harlot eyes were never lowered; they courted pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue which one summons and receives."

"This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women."

"Vice, coming from above, flowed along the gutters, spread itself out in the sheets of ornamental water, re-ascended in the fountains of the public gardens to fall again on to the roofs in a fine penetrating rain."

"À cette heure, elle voulut le mal, le mal que personne ne commet, le mal qui allait emplir son existence vide et la mettre enfin dans cet enfer, dont elle avait toujours peur, comme au temps où elle était petite fille."

"Sin became a luxury, a flower set in her hair, a diamond fastened on her brow."

"Paris, pareil à un pan de ciel étoilé tombé sur un coin de la terre noire, lui apparut sévère et comme fâché de son retour."

"Cependant Quenu se rappelait une phrase de Charvet, cette fois, qui déclarait que « ces bourgeois empâtés, ces boutiquiers engraissés, prêtant leur soutien à un gouvernement d’indigestion générale, devaient être jetés les premiers au cloaque. » C’était grâce à eux, grâce à leur égoïsme du ventre, que le despotisme s’imposait et rongeait une nation."

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "she’s been more than an hour in there! When the priests set about cleansing her of her sins, the choir-boys have to form in line to pass the buckets of filth and empty them in the street!"

"As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell. This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable. Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note."

"Respectable people... What bastards!"

"Nana was a great coquette. She did not always wash her feet, but she wore such tight boots that she suffered a perfect martyrdom; and if anyone questioned her, seeing her face grow purple, she answered that she had a stomach-ache, so as not to confess her coquetry."

"They called her 'the chicken', for she had in truth the soft flesh and country freshness of a chicken."

"With eyes again dreamily gazing upward, Hélène remained plunged in reverie. She was the Lady Rowena; she loved with the serenity and intensity of a noble mind. That spring morning, that great, gentle city, those early wall-flowers shedding their perfume on her lap, had little by little filled her heart with tenderness."

"How she had cheated herself with her integrity and nice honor, which had girt her round with the empty joys of piety! No, no; she had had enough of it; she wished to live!"

"All Paris was now illumined. The tiny dancing flames had speckled the sea of shadows from one end of the horizon to the other, and now, as in a summer night, millions of fixed stars seemed to be serenely gleaming there. Not a puff of air, not a quiver of the atmosphere stirred these lights, to all appearance suspended in space. Paris, now invisible, had fallen into the depths of an abyss as vast as a firmament."

"Hélène slowly surveyed the room. In this respectable society, amongst these apparently decent middle-class people, were there none but faithless wives? With her strict provincial morality, she was amazed at the licensed promiscuity of Parisian life."

"Quand Hélène revint [...] elle pensait que jamais ils ne s’étaient moins aimés que ce jour-là."

"It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break."

"Est-ce qu'une femme a besoin de savoir jouer et chanter? Ah! mon petit, tu es trop bête... Nana a autre chose, parbleu! et quelque chose qui remplace tout."

"Tout d’un coup, dans la bonne enfant, la femme se dressait, inquiétante, apportant le coup de folie de son sexe, ouvrant l’inconnu du désir. Nana souriait toujours, mais d’un sourire aigu de mangeuse d’hommes."

"The curtain fell on an apotheosis, wherein the Cuckold's Chorus knelt and sang a hymn of gratitude to Venus, who stood there with smiling lips, her stature enhanced by her sovran nudity."

"She had not taken her hat off, and she wore a dark dress of an indecisive colour midway between puce and goose dripping."

"Foucarmont had twice fought duels, and he was in consequence most politely treated, and admitted into every circle."

"The courtesans, as Vandeuvres used to say, avenged public morality by emptying his money bags."

"You know, I'm disgusted when dirty little boys run after old women."

"The Russians had a great taste for her owing to her embonpoint."

"She was listening to his proposals, and continually refusing them with shakes of the head, and that temptress's laughter which is peculiar to a voluptuous blonde."

"Wasn't it true that the moment two women were together in the presence of their lovers their first idea was to do one another out of them? It was a law of nature!"

"Both women, looking different ways, kept shrugging their shoulders, and asking themselves how the deuce the other could tell such woppers!"

"The air there was heavy with the somnolence which accompanies a long vigil, and the lamps cast a wavering light, whilst their burnt-out wicks glowed red within their globes. The ladies had reached that vaguely melancholy hour when they felt it necessary to tell each other their histories."

"The night threatened to end in the unloveliest way. In a corner by themselves, Maria Blond and Léa de Horn had begun squabbling at close quarters, the former accusing the latter of consorting with people of insufficient wealth."

"She offered herself to him with that quiet expression which is peculiar to a good-natured courtesan."

"He was a young dandy, and his habiliments, even to his gloves, were entirely yellow."

"Ce fut une jouissance mêlée de remords, une de ces jouissances de catholique que la peur de l’enfer aiguillonne dans le péché."

"Madame Jules was a woman of no age. She had the parchment skin and changeless features peculiar to old maids whom no one ever knew in their younger years."

"Satin occupied a couple of rooms, which a chemist had furnished for her in order to save her from the clutches of the police; but in little more than a twelvemonth she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs, dirtied the curtains, and that in a manner so furiously filthy and untidy, that the lodgings seemed as though inhabited by a pack of mad cats."

"Amid that company of gentlemen with the great names and the old upright traditions;, the two women sat face to face, exchanging tender glances, conquering, reigning, in tranquil defiance of the laws of sex, in open contempt for the male portion of the community. The gentlemen burst into applause."

"Great disorders lead to great conversions. Providence would have its opportunity."

"Existence is so bitter for every one of us! Ought we not to forgive others much, my friend, if we wish to merit forgiveness ourselves?"

"A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to rot on the ground by himself."

"Alors, Nana, tout de suite, entama La Faloise. Il postulait depuis longtemps l'honneur d'être ruiné par elle, afin d'être parfaitement chic."

"At every mouthful Nana swallowed an acre."

"The rage for debasing things was inborn in her. It did not suffice her to destroy them, she must soil them too."

"Like those antique monsters whose redoubtable domains were covered with skeletons, she rested her feet on human skulls. She was ringed round with catastrophes."

"When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium."

"Her anger was rekindled. "You see, I keep it to myself, but, oh! it’s more than I can stand. Don’t say anything, sir; don’t say anything, or I’ll explode!" He said nothing, and she exploded all the same."

"The shelves had the melancholy emptiness and the false luxury of families where inferior meat is purchased so as to be able to put flowers on the table."

""Those beasts have everything and we get nothing—not even a crust if we’re starving! The only thing they’re fit for is to be taken in! Just mark my words!" Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother’s pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function in life was to marry and to pay."

"She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself."

"Monsieur Josserand died very quietly—a victim of his own honesty. He had lived a useless life, and he went off, worthy to the last, weary of all the petty things in life, done to death by the heartless conduct of the only human beings he had ever loved."

"He wept for truth which was dead, for Heaven which was void. Beyond the marble walls and gleaming jewelled altars, the huge plaster Christ had no longer a single drop of blood in its veins."

"La certitude d'avoir empêche de désirer."

"You know, they’ll have their revenge." "Who will?" "The women, of course."

"It was the usual story of penniless young men, who think themselves obliged by their birth to choose a liberal profession and bury themselves in a sort of vain mediocrity, happy even when they escape starvation, notwithstanding their numerous degrees."

"She was not shocked; it seemed to her that every woman had a right to arrange her life as she liked, when she was alone and free in the world. For her own part, however, she had never given way to such ideas; her sense of right and her healthy nature naturally maintained her in the respectability in which she had always lived."

"Mais il avait oublié l’inventaire, il ne voyait pas son empire, ces magasins crevant de richesses. Tout avait disparu, les victoires bruyantes d’hier, la fortune colossale de demain. D’un regard désespéré, il suivait Denise, et quand elle eut passé la porte, il n’y eut plus rien, la maison devint noire."

"Crever pour crever, je préfère crever de passion que de crever d'ennui!"

"You don't understand this language, old fellow: otherwise you'd know that action contains its own reward. To act, to create, to fight against facts, to overcome them or be overcome by them—the whole of human health and happiness is made up of that!"

"A woman's opinion, however humble she may be, is always worth listening to, if she's got any sense... If you put yourself in my hands, I shall certainly make a decent man of you."

"His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by wavering faith, were replaced by his bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Woman now came and spent her leisure time in his establishment, those shivering anxious hours which she had formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, an ever renewed struggle of the god of dress against the husband, an ever renewed worship of the body with the promise of future divine beauty."

"How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one’s last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion’s charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness."

"Oh, that’s typical of you modern young men; you’ve nibbled at science and it’s made you ill, because you’ve not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You’d like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we’re only just beginning to understand it, and it’ll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won’t have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism... Yes, it’s the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you’re all inverted Werthers."

"The sea with its perpetual surging, its stubborn waves that broke against the cliffs twice a day, irritated him as being a mere senseless force that recked nothing of his grief, and had gone on wearing the same rocks away for centuries, without ever shedding a single tear for the death of a human being. It was too vast, too cold; and he hurried back home again and shut himself up in his room, that he might feel less conscious of his own littleness, less crushed between the boundlessness of sea and sky."

"Boredom was at the root of Lazare’s unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it."

"She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn’t give yourself?"

"The pride of abnegation had vanished, and she was willing that those she loved should be happy through other instrumentality than her own."

"Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?"

"His was the sceptical boredom of all his generation, no longer the romantic boredom of the Werthers and Renés, regretfully lamenting the passing of old beliefs, but the boredom of the new, doubting heroes, the young chemists who angrily declare the world an impossible place because they have not suddenly found life at the bottom of their retorts."

"The ground was trembling under their feet, and they clung to the resolutions made in their calmer hours so as not to sink into the abyss."

"If the world is to die of misery, at any rate let it die cheerfully, and in sympathy with itself!"

"On a pitch black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beet."

"Now Étienne could oversee the entire country. The darkness remained profound, but the old man's hand had, as it were, filled it with great miseries, which the young man unconsciously felt at this moment around him everywhere in the limitless tract. Was it not a cry of famine that the March wind rolled up across this naked plain? The squalls were furious: they seemed to bring the death of labour, a famine which would kill many men. And with wandering eyes he tried to pierce shades, tormented at once by the desire and by the fear of seeing. Everything was hidden in the unknown depths of the gloomy night. He only perceived, very far off, the blast furnaces and the coke ovens. The latter, with their hundreds of chimneys, planted obliquely, made lines of red flame; while the two towers, more to the left, burnt blue against the blank sky, like giant torches. It resembled a melancholy conflagration. No other stars rose on the threatening horizon except these nocturnal fires in a land of coal and iron."

"Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like."

"If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy."

"Pendant une demi-heure, le puits en dévora de la sorte, d'une gueule plus ou moins gloutonne, selon la profondeur de l'accrochage où ils descendaient, mais sans un arrêt, toujours affamé, de boyaux géants capables de digérer un peuple."

"It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks bursting out of her breeches."

"Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm."

"Il y avait des hommes si ambitieux qu'ils auraient torché les chefs, pour les entendre seulement dire merci."

"What misery! and all these girls, broken by fatigue, were silly enough to come here at night and make babies, more flesh to toil and suffer! It would never end while they went on getting themselves filled with starvelings. Ought they not rather to stop up their wombs and close their thighs tight against approaching disaster? But then, perhaps he was only harbouring these dismal thoughts because he resented being alone when all the others were pairing off to take their pleasure."

"They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since '89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice."

"There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois."

"All round there was a rising tide of beer, widow Désir’s barrels had all been broached, beer had rounded all paunches and was overflowing in all directions, from noses, eyes—and elsewhere. People were so blown out and higgledy-piggledy, that everybody’s elbows or knees were sticking into his neighbour and everybody thought it great fun to feel his neighbour’s elbows. All mouths were grinning from ear to ear in continuous laughter."

"But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored."

""And, then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next!" These words were greeted with a burst of laughter, and even the children shrugged their shoulders, for the hard wind blowing from the outer world had taken away all their belief. They harbored a secret fear of ghosts down in the mine, but scoffed at the empty heavens."

"When a man was honest in his dealings, you could forgive him the rest."

"Antagonism breeds extremism, and it was turning one into the zealous revolutionary and the other into an excessive advocate of caution, taking them beyond what they really thought and forcing them to adopt positions of which they then became prisoners."

"They, poor devils, were just machine-fodder, they were penned like cattle in housing-estates, the big Companies were gradually dominating their whole lives, regulating slavery, threatening to enlist all the nation’s workers, millions of hands to increase the wealth of a thousand idlers."

"The fire from heaven had fallen on this Sodom in the bowels of the earth where long ago pit girls committed untold abominations, and it had fallen so swiftly that they had not had time to come up, so that to this very day they were still burning down in this hell."

"They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger."

"It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians."

"What idiot imagined that happiness in this world depended on a share-out of wealth? These starry-eyed revolutionaries could demolish society and build a brave new world if they liked, but they would not by so doing add one single joy to man’s lot, nor relieve him of a single pain merely by sharing out the cake. In fact they would only spread out the unhappiness of the world, and some day they would make the very dogs howl with despair by removing them from the simple satisfaction of their instincts and raising them to the unsatisfied yearnings of passion."

"No, the only good was to be found in non-existence or, if one had to exist, in being a tree, a stone, or lower still, a grain of sand, for that cannot bleed under the heel of every passer-by."

"Du pain! est-ce que ça suffit, imbéciles ?"

"He would have given up everything -- education, comfort, luxurious life and his powerful position as manager -- if only just for one day he could have been the humblest of these poor devils under him and be free with his own body and be oafish enough to beat his wife and take his pleasure with the wives of his neighbors. He found himself wishing he were dying of starvation too, and that his empty belly were twisted with pains that made his brain reel, for perhaps that might deaden this relentless grief! Oh to live like a brute, possessing nothing but freedom to roam in the cornfields with the ugliest and most revolting haulage girl and possess her!"

"Oh, those bourgeois scum! One day they’d stuff 'em with champagne and truffles till their guts burst!"

"Oui, c'est votre idée, à vous tous, les ouvriers français, déterrer un trésor, pour le manger seul ensuite, dans un coin d'égoïsme et de fainéantise. Vous avez beau crier contre les riches, le courage vous manque de rendre aux pauvres l'argent que la fortune vous envoie... Jamais vous ne serez dignes du bonheur, tant que vous aurez quelque chose à vous, et que votre haine des bourgeois viendra uniquement de votre besoin enragé d'être des bourgeois à leur place."

"This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies."

"She was haunted by the vision of Chaval, and rambled on about him, about their cat and dog life together, the one day when he had been nice to her, in Jean-Bart, and the other days or alternate caresses and blows, when he half killed her with his embraces after nearly beating her to death."

"Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre."

"What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you? Didn’t it all boil down to sticking a female in front of you and painting her as you feel she is?"

"Ah! bonne terre, prends-moi, toi qui es la mère commune, l'unique source de la vie! toi l'éternelle, l'immortelle, où circule l'âme du monde, cette sève épandue jusque dans les pierres, et qui fait des arbres nos grands frères immobiles! ... Oui, je veux me perdre en toi, c'est toi que je sens là, sous mes membres, m'étreignant et m'enflammant, c'est toi seule qui seras dans mon oeuvre comme la force première, le moyen et le but, l'arche immense, où toutes les choses s'animent du souffle de tous les êtres!"

"Haven’t I told you scores of times that you’re always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!"

"From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture."

"The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. ... It’s like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time."

"The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones."

"Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!"

"It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside."

"Élodie, who was rising fifteen, lifted her anaemic, puffy, virginal face with its wispy hair; she was so thin-blooded that good country air seemed only to make her more sickly."

"They all listened to him, with curiosity but with the blank indifference of practical people who in their hearts no longer feared his God of wrath and chastisement. ... The whole thing was a complete waste of time; there was much more point in keeping on the right side of the Government police, who were the people with the power."

"If the earth was restful and good to those who loved it, the villagers contaminating it like vermin, those human insects battening on it's flesh, were enough to disgrace it and blight any approach to it."

"Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going."

"Only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play."

"Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la terre."

"She was a combative virgin, was Flora, scornful of the male sex, all of which in the end had led folk to conclude that she could not be quite all there."

"Ne me regardez plus comme ça, parce que vous allez vous user les yeux."

"Could he love this one, without killing her?"

"... la machine ronflait, crachait, comme une bête qu’on surmène, avec des sursauts, des coups de reins, où l’on aurait cru entendre craquer ses membres."

"He had devoured her, the strapping creature, tall and handsome, that she once had been, eating into her much as an insect eats into an oak, till here she was for ever on her back, reduced to nothingness, whereas he was still going."

"Does anyone kill as the result of reasoning? People only kill by an impulse of blood and nerves—the necessity to live, the joy of being strong."

"Sir, Would you allow me, grateful as I am for the kind reception you once extended to me, to show my concern about maintaining your well-deserved prestige and to point out that your star which, until now, has shone so brightly, risks being dimmed by the most shameful and indelible of stains?"

"A court martial, under orders, has just dared to acquit a certain Esterhazy, a supreme insult to all truth and justice. And now the image of France is sullied by this filth, and history shall record that it was under your presidency that this crime against society was committed. As they have dared, so shall I dare. Dare to tell the truth, as I have pledged to tell it, in full, since the normal channels of justice have failed to do so. My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice in this travesty. My nights would otherwise be haunted by the spectre of the innocent man, far away, suffering the most horrible of tortures for a crime he did not commit."

"The truth, first of all, about Dreyfus' trial and conviction: At the root of it all is one evil man, Lt. Colonel du Paty de Clam, who was at the time a mere Major. He is the entire Dreyfus case, and the entirety of it will only come to light when an honest enquiry firmly establishes his actions and responsibilities. ... Nobody would ever believe the experiments to which he subjected the unfortunate Dreyfus, the traps he set for him, the wild investigations, the monstrous fantasies, the whole demented torture. Ah, that first trial! What a nightmare it is for all who know it in its true details. Major du Paty de Clam had Dreyfus arrested and placed in solitary confinement. He ran to Mme Dreyfus, terrorised her, telling her that, if she talked, that was it for her husband. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Dreyfus was tearing his hair out and proclaiming his innocence."

"I would like to point out how this travesty was made possible, how it sprang out of the machinations of Major du Paty de Clam, how Generals Mercier, de Boisdeffre and Gonse became so ensnared in this falsehood that they would later feel compelled to impose it as holy and indisputable truth. Having set it all in motion merely by carelessness and lack of intelligence, they seem at worst to have given in to the religious bias of their milieu and the prejudices of their class. In the end, they allowed stupidity to prevail."

"The public was astounded; rumors flew of the most horrible acts, the most monstrous deceptions, lies that were an affront to our history. The public, naturally, was taken in. No punishment could be too harsh. The people clamored for the traitor to be publicly stripped of his rank and demanded to see him writhing with remorse on his rock of infamy. Could these things be true, these unspeakable acts, these deeds so dangerous that they must be carefully hidden behind closed doors to keep Europe from going up in flames? No! They were nothing but the demented fabrications of Major du Paty de Clam, a cover-up of the most preposterous fantasies imaginable. To be convinced of this one need only read carefully the accusation as it was presented before the court martial. How flimsy it is! The fact that someone could have been convicted on this charge is the ultimate iniquity. I defy decent men to read it without a stir of indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out there on Devil's Island. He knew several languages: a crime! He carried no compromising papers: a crime! He would occasionally visit his country of origin: a crime! He was hard-working, and strove to be well informed: a crime! He did not become confused: a crime! He became confused: a crime! And how childish the language is, how groundless the accusation!"

"It is said that within the council chamber the judges were naturally leaning toward acquittal. It becomes clear why, at that point, as justification for the verdict, it became vitally important to turn up some damning evidence, a secret document that, like God, could not be shown, but which explained everything, and was invisible, unknowable, and incontrovertible. I deny the existence of that document.... a document concerning national defense that could not be produced without sparking an immediate declaration of war tomorrow? No! No! It is a lie, all the more odious and cynical in that its perpetrators are getting off free without even admitting it. They stirred up all of France, they hid behind the understandable commotion they had set off, they sealed their lips while troubling our hearts and perverting our spirit. I know of no greater crime against the state."

"And now we come to the Esterhazy case. Three years have passed, many consciences remain profoundly troubled, become anxious, investigate, and wind up convinced that Dreyfus is innocent."

"Feelings were running high, for the conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus, an eventuality that the General Staff wanted at all cost to avoid. This must have led to a brief moment of psychological anguish. Note that, so far, General Billot was in no way compromised. Newly appointed to his position, he had the authority to bring out the truth. He did not dare, no doubt in terror of public opinion, certainly for fear of implicating the whole General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, and General Gonse, not to mention the subordinates. So he hesitated for a brief moment of struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the interest of the military. Once that moment passed, it was already too late. He had committed himself and he was compromised. From that point on, his responsibility only grew, he took on the crimes of others, he became as guilty as they, if not more so, for he was in a position to bring about justice and did nothing. Can you understand this: for the last year General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible knowledge to themselves?"

"Lt. Colonel Picquart had carried out his duty as an honest man. He kept insisting to his superiors in the name of justice. He even begged them, telling them how impolitic it was to temporize in the face of the terrible storm that was brewing and that would break when the truth became known."

"Meanwhile, in Paris, truth was marching on, inevitably, and we know how the long-awaited storm broke. Mr. Mathieu Dreyfus denounced Major Esterhazy as the real author of the bordereau just as Mr. Scheurer-Kestne was handing over to the Minister of Justice a request for the revision of the trial. This is where Major Esterhazy comes in. Witnesses say that he was at first in a panic, on the verge of suicide or running away. Then all of a sudden, emboldened, he amazed Paris by the violence of his attitude."

"It came down, once again, to the General Staff protecting itself, not wanting to admit its crime, an abomination that has been growing by the minute. In disbelief, people wondered who Commander Esterhazy's protectors were. First of all, behind the scenes, Lt. Colonel du Paty de Clam was the one who had concocted the whole story, who kept it going, tipping his hand with his outrageous methods. Next General de Boisdeffre, then General Gonse, and finally, General Billot himself were all pulled into the effort to get the Major acquitted, for acknowledging Dreyfus's innocence would make the War Office collapse under the weight of public contempt. And the astounding outcome of this appalling situation was that the one decent man involved, Lt. Colonel Picquart who, alone, had done his duty, was to become the victim, the one who got ridiculed and punished. O justice, what horrible despair grips our hearts? It was even claimed that he himself was the forger, that he had fabricated the letter-telegram in order to destroy Esterhazy . But, good God, why? To what end? Find me a motive. Was he, too, being paid off by the Jews? The best part of it is that Picquart was himself an anti-Semite. Yes! We have before us the ignoble spectacle of men who are sunken in debts and crimes being hailed as innocent, whereas the honor of a man whose life is spotless is being vilely attacked: A society that sinks to that level has fallen into decay."

"The Esterhazy affair, thus, Mr. President, comes down to this: a guilty man is being passed off as innocent. For almost two months we have been following this nasty business hour by hour. I am being brief, for this is but the abridged version of a story whose sordid pages will some day be written out in full."

"How could anyone expect a court martial to undo what another court martial had done? I am not even talking about the way the judges were hand-picked. Doesn't the overriding idea of discipline, which is the lifeblood of these soldiers, itself undercut their capacity for fairness? Discipline means obedience. When the Minister of War, the commander in chief, proclaims, in public and to the acclamation of the nation's representatives, the absolute authority of a previous verdict, how can you expect a court martial to rule against him?"

"General Billot directed the judges in his preliminary remarks, and they proceeded to judgment as they would to battle, unquestioningly. The preconceived opinion they brought to the bench was obviously the following: "Dreyfus was found guilty for the crime of treason by a court martial; he therefore is guilty and we, a court martial, cannot declare him innocent. On the other hand, we know that acknowledging Esterhazy's guilt would be tantamount to proclaiming Dreyfus innocent." There was no way for them to escape this rationale. So they rendered an iniquitous verdict that will forever weigh upon our courts martial and will henceforth cast a shadow of suspicion on all their decrees. The first court martial was perhaps unintelligent; the second one is inescapably criminal."

"We are told of the honor of the army; we are supposed to love and respect it. Ah, yes, of course, an army that would rise to the first threat, that would defend French soil, that army is the nation itself, and for that army we have nothing but devotion and respect. But this is not about that army, whose dignity we are seeking, in our cry for justice. What is at stake is the sword, the master that will one day, perhaps, be forced upon us. Bow and scrape before that sword, that god? No!"

"Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people's cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext."

"It is a crime that those people who wish to see a generous France take her place as leader of all the free and just nations are being accused of fomenting turmoil in the country, denounced by the very plotters who are conniving so shamelessly to foist this miscarriage of justice on the entire world. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice. Truth and justice, so ardently longed for! How terrible it is to see them trampled, unrecognized and ignored!"

"These military tribunals have, decidedly, a most singular idea of justice. This is the plain truth, Mr. President, and it is terrifying. It will leave an indelible stain on your presidency. I realise that you have no power over this case, that you are limited by the Constitution and your entourage. You have, nonetheless, your duty as a man, which you will recognise and fulfill. As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come."

"But this letter is long, Sir, and it is time to conclude it. I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice — unwittingly, I would like to believe — and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations. I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century. I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus's innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face. I accuse Gen. de Boisdeffre and Gen. Gonse of complicity in the same crime, the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark. I accuse Gen. de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous enquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naïve impudence. I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement. I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L'Eclair and L'Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing. Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man."

"In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the law of 29/7/1881 regarding the press, which make libel a punishable offence. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily. As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting."

"Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!"

"I've ripped it to pieces - your portrait, you know. I tried to work on it this morning, but it went from bad to worse, so I destroyed it..."

"You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [Émile Zola who was his youth friend in Aix-de-Provence and who had used Cezanne's life as model of a disturbed artist in his novel L'Oeuvre] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one."

"Many older students also read the meticulous details of Émile Zola's downtrodden classes, which strongly echoed some of the realties of my own impoverished neighborhood."

"He was a moment in the conscience of Man."

"His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born. I will not, certainly, deny his detestable fame. No one before him has raised so lofty a pile of ordure. That is his monument, and its greatness cannot be disputed."

"The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was due to their extraordinary genius and even more so to the awakening and seeking of a small minority for new truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual support."

"Then came the sweetly hypocritical compliments, the questions which are traps, the declarations which, if you follow him, he will suddenly interrupt with an 'Oh, my dear fellow, I wouldn't go as far as you!' followed by a virtual recantation of his previous arguments. In fact that art of talking without saying anything of which the Man of Medan is the master."

"... was named "chief of the executive power of the French Republic" and given the authority to negotiate the terms of surrender with Otto von Bismarck. ...Since escaping to Marseilles in September [1871] Zola had launched a newspaper, La Marseillaise... intended... as a voice of the proletariat. However, this organ ceased publication... when, ironically, the printers struck for higher wages [and] Zola, turning strike-buster, tried unsuccessfully to overcome by engaging a team of cut-rate printers from Arles. With his career as a newspaper proprietor thwarted, he began cultivating plans to secure... a [political] post... [e]ventually... secretary to an elderly and reputedly senile left-wing deputy in the National Assembly. He was also reporting on the National Assembly for La Cloche and fretting about the refugees occupying his apartment in Paris. "Has anything been ransacked or stolen?""

"In 1886 he published... L'Oeuvre, the hero of which was a painter. ...Zola's own notes are evidence that the portrait... was based partly on Manet and partly on Cézanne... [T]he hero, symbolizing an impressionist, is characterized as a painful mixture of genius and madness. The struggle between his great dreams and his insufficient creative power ends in utter failure, in suicide. ...Cézanne was deeply hurt ...[and] found there a moving echo of his own youth, which had been inseparable from that of Zola, but also the betrayal of his hopes. ...[H]e now saw irrevocably expressed in this novel: Zola's pity for those who had not achieved success, a pity more unbearable than contempt. Zola had not only failed to grasp the true meaning of the effort to which Cézanne and his comrades had devoted all their strength, he had lost all feeling of solidarity. From the secure castle he had built himself in , he passed judgement upon his friends, embracing all the bourgeois prejudices against which they had once fought together. The letter which Cézanne wrote to Zola to thank him for sending a copy of L'Oeuvre was meloncholy and sad; it was... a letter of farewell, and the two friends were never to meet again."

"Zola's true crime has been in daring to rise to defend the truth and civil liberty... for that courageous defense of the primordial rights of the citizen, he will be honored wherever men have souls that are free..."

"Last month marked the centennial anniversary of the greatest newspaper article of all time... Written in the form of an open letter to the President of France, the 4,000 word article, entitled "J'Accuse!" (I Accuse!), rightly has been judged a "masterpiece" of polemics and a literary achievement "of imperishable beauty." No other newspaper article has ever provoked such public debate and controversy or had such an impact on law, justice, and society."

"I will be Chateaubriand or nothing."

"Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but, as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations — but without confounding them — darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected. Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed. This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy."

"Ces deux moitiés de Dieu, le pape et l'empereur!"

"Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!"

"La raison, c'est l'intelligence en exercice; l'imagination c'est l'intelligence en érection"

"Socialism, or the Red Republic, is all one; for it would tear down the tricolour and set up the red flag. It would make penny pieces out of the Column Vendome. It would knock down the statue of Napoleon and raise up that of Marat in its stead. It would suppress the Académie, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honour. To the grand device Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it would add "Ou la mort. It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labour, which gives to each one his bread. It would abolish property and family. It would march about with the heads of the proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty them by massacres. It would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all that was low and small."

"Vous tenez à l’exemple [de la peine de mort]. Pourquoi? Pour ce qu’il enseigne. Que voulez-vous enseigner avec votre exemple? Qu’il ne faut pas tuer. Et comment enseignez-vous qu’il ne faut pas tuer? En tuant."

"Un jour viendra où il n'y aura plus d'autres champs de bataille que les marchés s'ouvrant au commerce et les esprits s'ouvrant aux idées. Un jour viendra où les boulets et les bombes seront remplacés par les votes, par le suffrage universel des peuples, par le vénérable arbitrage d'un grand sénat souverain qui sera à l'Europe ce que le parlement est à l'Angleterre, ce que la diète est à l'Allemagne, ce que l'assemblée législative est à la France! Un jour viendra où l'on montrera un canon dans les musées comme on y montre aujourd'hui un instrument de torture, en s'étonnant que cela ait pu être! Un jour viendra où l'on verra ces deux groupes immenses, les États-Unis d'Amérique, les États-Unis d'Europe, placés en face l'un de l'autre, se tendant la main par-dessus les mers, échangeant leurs produits, leur commerce, leur industrie, leurs arts, leurs génies, défrichant le globe, colonisant les déserts, améliorant la création sous le regard du créateur, et combinant ensemble, pour en tirer le bien-être de tous, ces deux forces infinies, la fraternité des hommes et la puissance de Dieu!"

"One can no more pray too much than love too much."

"Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief!"

"The best way to worship God is to love your wife."

"To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is a consummation."

"Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé."

"Je n'entre qu'à moitié dans la guerre civile. Je veux bien y mourir, je ne veux pas y tuer."

"On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées."

"Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!"

"L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Caïn."

"Vous créez un frisson nouveau."

"Jésus a pleuré, Voltaire a souri; c’est de cette larme divine et de ce sourire humain qu’est faite la douceur de la civilisation actuelle."

"For four hundred years the human race has not made a step but what has left its plain vestige behind. We enter now upon great centuries. The sixteenth century will be known as the age of painters, the seventeenth will be termed the age of writers, the eighteenth the age of philosophers, the nineteenth the age of apostles and prophets. To satisfy the nineteenth century, it is necessary to be the painter of the sixteenth, the writer of the seventeenth, the philosopher of the eighteenth; and it is also necessary, like Louis Blane, to have the innate and holy love of humanity which constitutes an apostolate, and opens up a prophetic vista into the future. In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven."

"Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!"

"Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots."

"C'est ici le combat du jour et de la nuit... Je vois de la lumière noire."

"There shall be no slavery of the mind."

"Lever à six, coucher à dix, Dîner à dix, souper à six, Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix."

"Ce besoin de l’immatériel est le plus vivace de tous. Il faut du pain; mais avant le pain, il faut l’idéal."

"Je représente un parti qui n'existe pas encore, le parti Révolution-Civilisation. Ce parti fera le vingtième siècle. Il en sortira d'abord les États-Unis d'Europe, puis les États-Unis du Monde."

"To divinise is human, to humanise is divine."

"Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it."

"Les Misérables"

"Aimer, c'est agir"

"Oriental studies have never been so intensive.... In the century of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist, today one is an Orientalist.... The Orient has become a sort of general preoccupation.... We shall see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism may not be as devoid of higher men as our civilization would like to believe."

"À quelle heure, s'il vous plaît?"

"Vous avez des ennemis? Mais c'est l'histoire de tout homme qui a fait une action grande ou crée une idée neuve. C'est la nuée qui bruit autour de tout ce qui brille. Il faut que la renommé ait des ennemis comme il faut que la lumière ait des moucherons. Ne vous en inquiétez pas, dédaignez! Ayez la sérénité dans votre esprit comme vous avez la limpidité dans votre vie."

"It is time, we repeat, that this monstrous slumber of men's consciences should end. It must not be, after that fearful scandal, the triumph of crime, that a scandal still more fearful should be presented to mankind: the indifference of the civilized world. Book I, III"

"At certain epochs of history, there are pleiades of great men; at other epochs, there are pleiades of vagabonds. But do not confound the epoch, the moment of Louis Bonaparte, with the 19th century: the toadstool sprouts at the foot of the oak, but it is not the oak. Book I, VI"

"At certain epochs in history, the whole human race, from all points of the earth, fix their eyes upon some mysterious spot whence it seems that universal destiny is about to issue. Book I, VI"

"Alas! of what is France thinking? Of a surety, we must awake this slumbering nation, we must take it by the arm, we must shake it, we must speak to it; we must scour the fields, enter the villages, go into the barracks, speak to the soldier who no longer knows what he is doing, speak to the labourer who has in his cabin an engraving of the Emperor, and who, for that reason, votes for everything they ask; we must remove the radiant phantom that dazzles their eyes; this whole situation is nothing but a huge and deadly joke. Book I, VI"

"Let us sum up this government! Who is at the Élysée and the Tuileries? Crime. Who is established at the Luxembourg? Baseness. Who at the Palais Bourbon? Imbecility. Who at the Palais d'Orsay?...And who are in the prisons... in the dungeons...in exile? Law, honour, intelligence, liberty, and the right. Book I, VI"

"The present government is a hand stained with blood, which dips a finger in the holy water. Book II, X"

"We who combat them are "the eternal enemies of order." We are—for they can as yet find nothing but this worn-out word—we are demagogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to believe in the sacredness of the human conscience, to resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's God, was called vagabondism... The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth would have been a vagabond. Book II, XI"

"This tribune was the terror of every tyranny and fanaticism, it was the hope of every one who was oppressed under Heaven. Whoever placed his foot upon that height, felt distinctly the pulsations of the great heart of mankind. There, providing he was a man of earnest purpose, his soul swelled within him, and shone without. A breath of universal philanthropy seized him, and filled his mind as the breeze fills the sail; so long as his feet rested upon those four planks, he was a stronger and a better man; he felt at that consecrated minute as if he were living the life of all the nations; words of charity for all men came to his lips; beyond the Assembly, grouped at his feet, and frequently in a tumult, he beheld the people, attentive, serious, with ears strained, and fingers on lips; and beyond the people, the human race, plunged in thought, seated in circles, and listening. Book V, V"

"From this tribune, incessantly vibrating, gushed forth perpetually a sort of sonorous flood, a mighty oscillation of sentiments and ideas, which, from billow to billow, and from people to people, flowed to the utmost confines of the earth, to set in motion those intelligent waves which are called souls. Book V, V"

"Two great problems hang over the world. War must disappear, and conquest must continue. These two necessities of a growing civilization seemed to exclude each other. How satisfy the one without failing the other? Book V, VII"

"Now it is all over. The great work is accomplished. And the results of the work!...Get all you can, gorge yourselves, grow a fat paunch; it is no longer a question of being a great people, of being a powerful people, of being a free nation, of casting a bright light; France no longer sees its way to that. Book V, IX"

"Now there is no more noise, no more confusion, no more talking, no more parliament, or parliamentarism. The Corps Législatif, the Senate, the Council of State, have all had their mouths sewn up. Book V, IX"

"Be proud, Frenchmen! Lift high your heads, Frenchmen! You are no longer anything, and this man is everything! He holds in his hand your intelligence, as a child holds a bird. Any day he pleases, he can strangle the genius of France. Book V, IX"

"The orator resumes: "And if it should happen some day that a man, having in his hand the five hundred thousand officeholders who constitute the government, and the four hundred thousand soldiers composing the army, if it should happen that this man should tear up the Constitution, should violate every law, break every oath, trample upon every right, commit every crime, do you know what your irremovable magistrates, instructors in the right, and guardians of the law, would do? They would hold their tongues." Book VIII, IV"

"From every agglomeration of men, from every city, from every nation, there inevitably arises a collective force. Place this collective force at the service of liberty, let it rule by universal suffrage, the city becomes a commune, the nation becomes a republic. This collective force is not, of its nature, intelligent. Belonging to all, it belongs to no one; it floats about, so to speak, outside of the people. Conclusion, Part First, II"

"There is... always, in a large population like that of France, a class which is ignorant, which suffers, covets, and struggles, placed between the brutish instinct which impels it to take, and the moral law which invites it to labour. In the grievous and oppressed condition in which it still is, this class, in order to maintain itself in probity and well-doing, requires all the pure and holy light that emanates from the Gospel; it requires that, on the one hand, the spirit of Jesus Christ, and, on the other, the spirit of the French Revolution, should address to it the same manly words, and should never cease to point out to it, as the only lights worthy of the eyes of man, the exalted and mysterious laws of human destiny,—self-denial, devotion, sacrifice, the labour which leads to material well-being, the probity which leads to inward well-being; even with this perennial instruction, at once divine and human, this class, so worthy of sympathy and fraternity, often succumbs. Conclusion, Part First, III"

"On the day when the human conscience shall lose its bearings, on the day when success shall carry the day before that forum, all will be at an end. The last moral gleam will reascend to heaven. Darkness will be in the mind of man. You will have nothing to do but to devour one another, wild beasts that you are! Conclusion, Part First, III"

"With moral degradation goes political degradation. Conclusion, Part First, III"

"They determined, once for all, to make an end of the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to drive back and repress for ever the upward tendency of mankind. To undo the labour of twenty generations; to kill in the nineteenth century, by strangulation... Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire, religious scrutiny, philosophical scrutiny, universal scrutiny; to crush throughout all Europe this immense vegetation of free thought, here a tender blade, there a sturdy oak; ...to resuscitate all they could of the Inquisition, and to stifle all they could of intelligence; to stultify youth, in other words to brutalize the future;... to say to nations: "Eat and think no more;".... Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"There was a nation among the nations, which was a sort of elder brother in this family of the oppressed, a prophet in the human tribe. This nation took the initiative of the whole human movement. It went on, saying, "Come!" and the rest followed. As a complement to the fraternity of men, in the Gospel, it taught the fraternity of nations. It spoke by the voice of its writers, of its poets, of its philosophers, of its orators, as by a single mouth, and its words flew to the extremities of the earth, to rest, like tongues of fire, upon the brow of all nations. It presided over the communion of intellects. Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"Now it is all over. The French nation is dead. Conclusion, Part Second, I"

"Let us have faith. No, let us not be cast down. To despair is to desert. Let us look to the future. The future,—no one knows what tempests still separate us from port, but the port, the distant and radiant port, is in sight; the future, we repeat, is the republic for all men; let us add, the future is peace with all men. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. However deep the shame of the present, whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of us... will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live, the virile age of mankind. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason why? because it is the mildest. This age, the immediate issue, the firstborn offspring, of the French Revolution, frees the slave in America, raises from his degradation the pariah in Asia, abolishes the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, carries the Gospel into the domain of the Koran, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to that of the most just, suppresses pirates, mitigates sentences, makes the galleys healthy, throws the red-hot iron into the sewer, condemns the penalty of death, removes the ball and chain from the leg of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and brands war, stifles Dukes of Alva and Charles the Ninths, and extracts the claws of tyrants. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man. In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,—writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton salt petre, of steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little, and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which prove to it the existence of God... It annihilates time, it annihilates space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the man sings and smiles. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"This was the work that the nineteenth century had done among men, and was continuing in glorious, fashion to do,—that century of sterility, that century of domination, that century of decadence, that century of degradation, as it is called by the pedants, the rhetoricians, the imbeciles, and all that filthy brood of bigots, of knaves, and of sharpers, who sanctimoniously slaver gall upon glory, who assert that Pascal was a madman, Voltaire a coxcomb, and Rousseau a brute, and whose triumph it would be to put a fool's-cap upon the human race. Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"O my country! it is at this moment, when I see you bleeding, inanimate, your head hanging, your eyes closed, your mouth open, and no words issuing therefrom, the marks of the whip upon your shoulders, the nails of the executioner's shoes imprinted upon your body, naked and ashamed, and like a thing deprived of life, an object of hatred, of derision, alas! it is at this moment, my country, that the heart of the exile overflows with love and respect for you! Conclusion, Part Second, II"

"Vous avez raison, monsieur, quand vous me dites que le livre les Misérables est écrit pour tous les peuples. Je ne sais s'il sera lu par tous, mais je l'ai écrit pour tous. Il s'adresse à l'Angleterre autant qu'à l'Espagne, à l'Italie autant qu'à la France, à l'Allemagne autant qu'à l'Irlande, aux républiques qui ont des esclaves aussi bien qu'aux empires qui ont des serfs. Les problèmes sociaux dépassent les frontières. Les plaies du genre humain, ces larges plaies qui couvrent le globe, ne s'arrêtent point aux lignes bleues ou rouges tracées sur la mappemonde. Partout où l'homme ignore et désespère, partout où la femme se vend pour du pain, partout où l'enfant souffre faute d'un livre qui l'enseigne et d'un foyer qui le réchauffe, le livre les Misérables frappe à la porte et dit: Ouvrez-moi, je viens pour vous."

"À l'heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation où nous sommes, le misérable s'appelle L'HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gémit dans toutes les langues."

"Du fond de l'ombre où nous sommes et où vous êtes, vous ne voyez pas beaucoup plus distinctement que nous les radieuses et lointaines portes de l'éden. Seulement les prêtres se trompent. Ces portes saintes ne sont pas derrière nous, mais devant nous."

"Ce livre, les Misérables, n'est pas moins que votre miroir que le nôtre. Certains hommes, certaines castes, se révoltent contre ce livre, je le comprends. Les miroirs, ces diseurs de vérité, sont haïs; cela ne les empêche pas d'être utiles. Quant à moi, j'ai écrit pour tous, avec un profond amour pour mon pays, mais sans me préoccuper de la France plus que d'un autre peuple. A mesure que j'avance dans la vie je me simplifie, et je deviens de plus en plus patriote de l'humanité."

"En somme, je fais ce que je peux, je souffre de la souffrance universelle, et je tâche de la soulager, je n'ai que les chétives forces d'un homme, et je crie à tous: aidez-moi."

"Italiens ou français, la misère nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire écrit et que la philosophie médite, la misère est le vêtement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passé par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore."

"Dieu se manifeste à nous au premier degré à travers la vie de l’univers, et au deuxième degré à travers la pensée de l’homme. La deuxième manifestation n’est pas moins sacrée que la première. La première s’appelle la Nature, la deuxième s’appelle l’Art."

"Homère est un des génies qui résolvent ce beau problème de l’art, le plus beau de tous peut-être, la peinture vraie de l’humanité obtenue par le grandissement de l’homme, c’est-à-dire la génération du réel dans l’idéal."

"Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme."

"La musique...est la vapeur de l’art. Elle est à la poésie ce que la rêverie est à la pensée, ce que le fluide est au liquide, ce que l’océan des nuées est à l’océan des ondes."

"Ce qu’on ne peut dire et ce qu’on ne peut taire, la musique l’exprime."

"They had done him the honor to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet."

"It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us."

"Mettre tout en équilibre, c'est bien; mettre tout en harmonie, c'est mieux."

"Cimourdain was a pure-minded but gloomy man. He had "the absolute" within him. He had been a priest, which is a solemn thing. Man may have, like the sky, a dark and impenetrable serenity; that something should have caused night to fall in his soul is all that is required. Priesthood had been the cause of night within Cimourdain. Once a priest, always a priest. Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background."

"Cimourdain was one of those men who have a voice within them, and who listen to it. Such men seem absent-minded; they are not; they are all attention. Cimourdain knew everything and nothing. He knew everything about science, and nothing at all about life. Hence his inflexibility. His eyes were bandaged like Homer's Themis. He had the blind certainty of the arrow, which sees only the mark and flies to it. In a revolution, nothing is more terrible than a straight line. Cimourdain went straight ahead, as sure as fate. Cimourdain believed that, in social geneses, the extreme point is the solid earth; an error peculiar to minds which replace reason with logic."

"He who is a legend in his own time is ruled by that legend. It may begin in absolute innocence, but, to cover up flaws and maintain the myth of Divine Power, one must employ desperate measures."

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

"Et la marine va, papa, venir à Malte."

"He who opens a school, closes a prison"

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."

"I am reading Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. A book which I remember of old, but I had a great longing to read it again. It is very beautiful, that figure of Monseigneur Myriel or Bienvenu I think sublime....It is good to read such a book again, I think, just to keep some feelings allive. Especially love for humanity, and the faith in, and consciousness of, something higher, in short, quelque chose là-huat."

"Hugo, like a priest, always has his head bowed -- bowed so low that he can see nothing except his own navel."

"In Hugo is maybe where I learned the freedom to be discursive, to trust that there will be readers who can accept long sentences, and long meanings. In the nineteenth century quite ordinary readers could do that."

"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo."

"A glittering humbug."

"("Who is the greatest French poet?") Victor Hugo, alas!"

"Victor Hugo has spoken of the nineteenth century as being woman's era, and among the most noticeable epochs in this era is the uprising of women against the twin evils of slavery and intemperance, which had foisted themselves like leeches upon the civilization of the present age."

"I admire Victor Hugo -- I appreciate his genius, his brilliancy, his romanticism; though he is not one of my literary passions. But Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all great poets of all great nations are interpreters of eternal things, and my spirit reverently follows them into the regions where Beauty and Truth and Goodness are one."

"For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman.""

"Victor Hugo in alluding to this effort on the part of woman for the redress of the wrongs and grievances under which she had suffered, says, that as the last age was notable for the effort to gain Men’s Rights, so the present generation would aim to create a revolution in public sentiment which should gain the independence of woman."

"The first romantics were seers without even really realizing it: their soul's education began by accident: abandoned trains still smoking, occasionally taking to the tracks. Lamartine was a seer now and again, but strangling on old forms. Hugo, too pigheaded, certainly saw in his most recent works: Les Misérables is really a poem. I've got Les Chatiments with me; Stella gives some sense of Hugo's vision. Too much Belmontet and Lamennais with their Jehovahs and colonnades, massive crumbling edifices."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"Hugo, optimism incarnate, the vatic poet, recognised by God as the only worthy interlocutor, the courageous defender of the Communards...this cantor of the poor, the only one who was- and still is- read by the working classes,... this astonishing man: half priest and half anarchist, incontestable sovereign of the century."

"Anyone placed at exactly the same distance between yourself and your enemy will always appear closer to your enemy."

"La Société n'est pas, comme on le croit d'ordinaire, le développement de la Nature, mais bien sa décomposition et sa refonte entière. C'est un second édifice, bâti avec les décombres du premier."

"Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid."

"Il y a peu d'hommes qui se permettent un usage vigoureux et intrépide de leur raison, et osent l'appliquer à tous les objets dans toute sa force. Le tems est venu où il faut l'appliquer ainsi à tous les objets de la Morale, de la Politique et de la Société, aux rois, aux ministres, aux grands, aux philosophes, aux principes des Sciences, des Beaux-arts, etc., sans quoi, on restera dans la médiocrité."

"Ne tenir dans la main de personne, être homme de son cœur, de ses principes, de ses sentiments, c'est ce que j'ai vu de plus rare."

"L'ambition prend aux petites âmes plus facilement qu'aux grandes, comme le feu prend plus aisément à la paille, aux chaumières qu'aux palais."

"L'esprit n'est souvent au cœur que ce que la bibliothèque d'un château est à la personne du maître."

"Ce que les poètes, les orateurs, même quelques philosophes nous disent sur l'amour de la Gloire, on nous le disait au Collège, pour nous encourager à avoir les prix. Ce que l'on dit aux enfants pour les engager à préférer à une tartelette les louanges de leurs bonnes, c'est ce qu'on répète aux hommes pour leur faire préférer à un intérêt personnel les éloges de leurs contemporains ou de la postérité."

"Celui-là fait plus, pour un hydropique, qui le guérit de la soif, que celui qui lui donne un tonneau de vin. Appliquez cela aux richesses."

"Il y a à parier que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre."

"Il y a une sorte de plaisir attaché au courage qui se met au-dessus de la fortune. Mépriser l'argent, c'est détrôner un Roi. Il y a du ragoût."

"Il y a un genre d’indulgence pour ses ennemis, qui paraît une sottise plutôt que de la bonté ou de la grandeur d’âme. M. de C… me paraît ridicule par la sienne. Il me paraît ressembler à Arlequin, qui dit : « Tu me donnes un soufflet, eh bien ! je ne suis point encore fâché. » Il faut avoir l’esprit de haïr ses ennemis."

"Men whose only concern is other people's opinion of them are like actors who put on a poor performance to win the applause of people of poor taste; some of them would be capable of good acting in front of a good audience. A decent man plays his part to the best of his ability, regardless of the taste of the gallery."

"Stubbornness equals character roughly as lust equals love."

"Il y a plus de fous que de sages, et dans le sage même, il y a plus de folie que de sagesse."

"Quand on soutient que les gens les moins sensibles sont, à tout prendre, les plus heureux, je me rappelle le proverbe indien : «Il vaut mieux être assis que debout, être couché qu'assis; mais il vaut mieux être mort que tout cela.»"

"Amour, folie aimable; ambition, sottise sérieuse."

"L'intérêt d'argent est la grande épreuve des petits caractères, mais ce n'est encore que la plus petite pour les caractères distingués..."

"Celui qui veut trop faire dépendre son bonheur de sa raison, qui le soumet à l'examen, qui chicane, pour ainsi dire, ses jouissances, et n'admet que des plaisirs délicats, finit par n'en plus avoir. C'est un homme qui, à force de faire carder son matelas, le voit diminuer, et finit par coucher sur la dure."

"M... me disait que j'avais un grand malheur: c'était de ne pas me faire à la toute-puissance des sots. Il avait raison, et j'ai vu qu'en entrant dans le monde, un sot avait de grands avantages, celui de se trouver parmi ses pairs. C'est comme frère Lourdis dans le temple de la Sottise."

"Les gens du monde et de la Cour donnent aux hommes et aux choses une valeur conventionnelle dont ils s'étonnent de se trouver les dupes. Ils ressemblent à des calculateurs, qui, en faisant un compte, donneraient aux chiffres une valeur variable et arbitraire, et qui, ensuite, dans l'addition, leur rendant leur valeur réelle et réglée, seraient tout surpris de ne pas trouver leur compte."

"Il y a des moments où le monde paraît s'apprécier lui-même ce qu'il vaut. J'ai souvent démêlé qu'il estimait ceux qui n'en faisaient aucun cas; et il arrive souvent que c'est une recommandation auprès de lui, que de le mépriser souverainement, pourvu que ce mépris soit vrai, sincère, naïf, sans affectation, sans jactance."

"L’art de la parenthèse est un des grands secrets de l’éloquence dans la Société."

"C'est la plaisanterie qui doit faire justice de tous les travers des hommes et de la Société. C'est par elle qu'on évite de se compromettre. C'est par elle qu'on met tout en place sans sortir de la sienne. C'est elle qui atteste notre supériorité sur les choses et sur les personnes dont nous nous moquons, sans que les personnes puissent s'en offenser, à moins qu'elles ne manquent de gaîté ou de mœurs. La réputation de savoir bien manier cette arme donne à l'homme d'un rang inférieur, dans le monde et dans la meilleure compagnie, cette sorte de considération que les militaires ont pour ceux qui manient supérieurement l'épée. J'ai entendu dire à un homme d'esprit: ôtez à la plaisanterie son empire et je quitte demain la Société. C'est une sorte de duel où il n'y a pas de sang versé, et qui, comme l'autre, rend les hommes plus mesurés et plus polis."

"Peu de personnes peuvent aimer un philosophe. C'est presque un ennemi public qu'un homme qui dans les différentes prétentions des hommes, et dans le mensonge des choses, dit à chaque homme et à chaque chose: « Je ne te prends que pour ce que tu es, je ne t'apprécie que [pour] ce que tu vaux; » et ce n'est pas une petite entreprise de se faire aimer et estimer, avec l'annonce de ce ferme propos."

"Un homme d'esprit prétendait, devant des millionnaires, qu'on pouvait être heureux avec deux mille écus de rente. Ils soutinrent le contraire avec aigreur, et même avec emportement. Au sortir de chez eux, il cherchait la cause de cette aigreur de la part de gens qui avaient de l'amitié pour lui. Il la trouva enfin. C'est que par là, il leur faisait entrevoir qu'il n'était pas dans leur dépendance. Tout homme qui a peu de besoins semble menacer les riches d'être toujours prêt à leur échapper. Les tyrans voient par là qu'ils perdent un esclave. On peut appliquer cette réflexion à toutes les passions en général. L'homme qui a vaincu le penchant à l'amour, montre une indifférence toujours odieuse aux femmes. Elles cessent aussitôt de s'intéresser à lui. C'est peut-être pour cela que personne ne s'intéresse à la fortune d'un philosophe: il n'a pas les passions qui émeuvent la Société. On voit qu'on ne peut presque rien faire pour son bonheur, et on le laisse là."

"La Nature ne m'a point dit: ne sois point pauvre; encore moins: sois riche; mais elle me crie: sois indépendant."

"[Prudence] replaces [strength] by saving the man who has the misfortune of not possessing it from most occasions when it's needed."

"Les nouveaux amis que nous faisons après un certain âge, et par lesquels nous cherchons à remplacer ceux que nous avons perdus, sont à nos anciens amis ce que les yeux de verre, les dents postiches et les jambes de bois sont aux véritables yeux, aux dents naturelles et aux jambes de chair et d'os."

"Dans les naïvetés d'un enfant bien né, il y a quelquefois une philosophie bien aimable."

"Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan: Si cadens adoraveris me."

"La pauvreté met le crime au rabais."

"Je n'étudie que ce qui me plaît; je n'occupe mon esprit que des idées qui m'intéressent. Elles seront utiles ou inutiles, soit à moi, soit aux autres. Le tems amènera ou n'amènera pas les circonstances qui me feront faire de mes acquisitions un emploi profitable. Dans tous les cas, j'aurai eu l'avantage inestimable de ne me pas contrarier, et d'avoir obéi à ma pensée et à mon caractère."

"J'ai détruit mes passions, à peu près comme un homme violent tue son cheval, ne pouvant le gouverner."

"La Fortune, pour arriver à moi, passera par les conditions que lui impose mon caractère."

"En renonçant au monde et à la fortune, j'ai trouvé le bonheur, le calme, la santé, même la richesse; et, en dépit du proverbe, je m'aperçois que qui quitte la partie la gagne."

"Ma vie entière est un tissu de contrastes apparents avec mes principes. Je n'aime point les Princes, et je suis attaché à une Princesse et à un Prince. On me connaît des maximes républicaines, et plusieurs de mes amis sont revêtus de décorations monarchiques. J'aime la pauvreté volontaire, et je vis avec des gens riches. Je fuis les honneurs, et quelques-uns sont venus à moi. Les lettres sont presque ma seule consolation, et je ne vois point de beaux esprits, et ne vais point à l'Académie. Ajoutez que je crois les illusions nécessaires à l'homme, et je vis sans illusion; que je crois les passions plus utiles que la raison, et je ne sais plus ce que c'est que les passions, etc."

"L'honnête homme, détrompé de toutes les illusions, est l'homme par excellence. Pour peu qu'il ait d'esprit, sa société est très aimable. Il ne saurait être pédant, ne mettant d'importance à rien. Il est indulgent, parce qu'il se souvient qu'il a eu des illusions, comme ceux qui en sont encore occupés. C'est un effet de son insouciance d'être sûr dans le commerce, de ne se permettre ni redites, ni tracasseries. Si on se les permet à son égard, il les oublie ou les dédaigne. Il doit être plus gai qu'un autre, parce qu'il est constamment en état d'épigramme contre son prochain. Il est dans le vrai et rit des faux pas de ceux qui marchent à tâtons dans le faux. C'est un homme qui, d'un endroit éclairé, voit dans une chambre obscure les gestes ridicules de ceux qui s'y promènent au hasard. Il brise, en riant, les faux poids et les fausses mesures qu'on applique aux hommes et aux choses."

"Les femmes d'un état mitoyen, qui ont l'espérance ou la manie d'être quelque chose dans le monde, n'ont ni le bonheur de la Nature, ni celui de l'opinion. Ce sont les plus malheureuses créatures que j'aie connues."

"Si l'on veut se faire une idée de l'amour-propre des femmes, dans leur jeunesse, qu'on en juge par celui qui leur reste, après qu'elles ont passé l'âge de plaire."

"Il me semble, disait M. de…, à propos des faveurs des femmes, qu'à la vérité, cela se dispute au concours, mais que cela ne se donne ni au sentiment, ni au mérite."

"Une femme d'esprit m'a dit un jour un mot qui pourrait bien être le secret de son sexe: c'est que toute femme, en prenant un amant, tient plus de compte de la manière dont les autres femmes voient cet homme, que de la manière dont elle le voit elle-même."

"Sentir fait penser. On en convient assez aisément; on convient moins que penser fasse sentir; mais cela n'est guère moins vrai."

"On dit communément: la plus belle femme du monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a; ce qui est très faux: elle donne précisément ce qu'on croit recevoir, puisqu'en ce genre, c'est l'imagination qui fait le prix de ce qu'on reçoit."

"Le bon goût, le tact et le bon ton, ont plus de rapport que n'affectent de le croire les Gens de Lettres. Le tact, c'est le bon goût appliqué au main- tien et à la conduite; le bon ton, c'est le bon goût appliqué aux discours et à la conversation."

"The perfect man ... is in a well-lit area watching the foolish antics of people stumbling around in the dark. He can demolish with a laugh the false standards and judgments which others apply to people and things."

"A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public."

"Il en est un peu des réputations littéraires, et surtout des réputations de théâtre, comme des fortunes qu'on faisait autrefois dans les Iles. Il suffisait presque autrefois d'y passer, pour parvenir à une grande richesse, mais ces grandes fortunes mêmes ont nui à celles de la génération suivante: les terres épuisées n'ont plus rendu si abondamment."

"On n'est point un homme d'esprit pour avoir beaucoup d'idées, comme on n'est pas un bon général pour avoir beaucoup de soldats."

"On se fâche souvent contre les Gens de Lettres qui se retirent du monde. On veut qu'ils prennent intérêt à la Société dont ils ne tirent presque point d'avantage. On veut les forcer d'assister éternellement aux tirages d'une loterie où ils n'ont point de billet."

"Ce que j'admire dans les anciens philosophes, c'est le désir de conformer leurs mœurs à leurs écrits: c'est ce que l'on remarque dans Platon, Théophraste et plusieurs autres. La Morale pratique était si bien la partie essentielle de leur philosophie, que plusieurs furent mis à la tête des écoles, sans avoir rien écrit; tels que Xénocrate, Polémon, Heusippe, etc. Socrate, sans avoir donné un seul ouvrage et sans avoir étudié aucune autre science que la morale, n'en fut pas moins le premier philosophe de son siècle."

"Ce qu'on sait le mieux, c'est: 1. ce qu'on a deviné; 2. ce qu'on a appris par l'expérience des hommes et des choses; 3. ce qu'on a appris, non dans les livres, mais par les livres, c'est-à-dire par les réflexions qu'ils font faire; 4. ce qu'on a appris dans les livres ou avec des maîtres."

"Les économistes sont des chirurgiens qui … opérant à merveille sur le mort et martyrisant le vif."

"Les ministres ne sont que des gens d'affaires, et ils ne sont si importants que parce que la terre du gentilhomme, leur maître, est très considérable."

"Le public est gouverné comme il raisonne. Son droit est de dire des sottises, comme celui des ministres est d'en faire."

"Il est malheureux pour les hommes, heureux peut-être pour les tyrans, que les pauvres, les malheureux, n'aient pas l'instinct ou la fierté de l'éléphant qui ne se reproduit point dans la servitude."

"La plupart des institutions sociales paraissent avoir pour objet de maintenir l'homme dans une médiocrité d'idées et de sentiments qui le rendent plus propre à gouverner ou à être gouverné."

"Il avait, par grandeur d'âme, fait quelques pas vers la fortune, et par grandeur d'âme il la méprisa."

"M..., vieux célibataire, disait plaisamment que le mariage est un état trop parfait pour l'imperfection de l'homme."

"Il y a une modestie d'un mauvais genre, fondée sur l'ignorance, qui nuit quelquefois à certains caractères supérieurs, qui les retient dans une sorte de médiocrité: ce qui me rappelle le mot que disait à déjeuner à des gens de la Cour un homme d'un mérite reconnu : « Ah! Messieurs, que je regrette le temps que j'ai perdu à apprendre combien je valais mieux que vous! »"

"Il était passionné et se croyait sage; j'étais folle, mais je m'en doutais, et, sous ce point de vue, j'étais plus près que lui de la Sagesse."

"Les sots, les ignorans, les gens malhonnêtes, vont prendre dans les livres des idées, de la raison, des sentimens nobles et élevés, comme une femme riche va chez un marchand d'étoffes s'assortir pour son argent."

"Les vieillards, dans les capitales, sont plus corrompus que les jeunes gens."

"I once read that there's nothing worse for everyone concerned than a reign that's lasted too long. I've also heard that God is eternal."

"Running a house should be left to innkeepers."

"Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list."

"Someone was talking about the respect we owe the public. “Yes,” said M...., “It's a question of prudence. Nobody has a high opinion of fishwives but who would dare offend them while walking through the fish market.”"

"A devout and naïve Christian was admonishing those who questioned the articles of faith. “A true Christian must never examine the things he's told to believe, gentlemen,” he said. “It's like taking a pill: if you chew it, it's so bitter you'll never get it down.”"

"I asked M.—why he'd turned down the offer of a particular post. “I didn't want a post where the office is more important than the holder of it,” he replied."

"A man begins every stage of his life as a novice."

"A man well-known to be a liar had just told a most improbable story. “Sir, while I believe you,” someone said, “you must admit that it's very wrong of truth not to condescend to be more plausible.”"

"High society is a poor play, a bad, boring opera, made slightly better by its staging, costumes and scenery."

"L'amour, tel qu'il existe dans la société, n'est que l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux épidermes."

"La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri."

"Quiconque n'a pas de caractère n'est pas un homme, c'est une chose."

"Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem."

"The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless."

"We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding."

"Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything."

"Je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le cœur se brise ou se bronze."

"There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools."

"La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera."

"There are people who feel the need to be prominent, to rise above their fellow men, at all costs. Their whole concern is to play the charlatan in full view of everyone: on the stage, on the throne or on the gallows, they'll always feel fine as long as they're the centre of attention."

"In the world you have three sorts of friends: your friends who love you, your friends who do not care about you and your friends who hate you."

"Pleasure can be supported by an illusion, but happiness rests upon truth."

"Rien ne réussit comme le succès."

"Sleeping on a plank has one advantage — it encourages early rising."

"My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."

"Tous pour un, un pour tous, c'est notre devise"

"Eh, gentlemen, let us reckon upon accidents! Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin."

"Weep," said Athos, "weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!"

"You are young, and your bitter recollections have time to change themselves into sweet remembrances.""

"Learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything."

"Eh! sire, that is the fate of truth; she is a stern companion; she bristles all over with steel; she wounds those whom she attacks, and sometimes him who speaks her."

"My friend, the pleasures to which we are not accustomed oppress us more than the griefs with which we are familiar."

"Cherchez la femme, pardieu ! cherchez la femme !"

"Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires ; aussitôt qu'on me fait un rapport, je dis : «Cherchez la femme !»"

"Les chaînes du mariage sont si lourdes qu'il faut être deux pour les porter ; quelquefois trois."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"For many years, I used to take The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas with me anytime I traveled. I’ve probably read it 20 or more times."

"Although I work, and seldom cease, At Dumas père and Dumas fils, Alas, I cannot make me care For Dumas fils and Dumas père."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"This violence is a calm that disturbs you."

"But I would adore that thief who is my mother."

"If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!"

"I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face."

"By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste."

"Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life."

"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."

"Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?"

"But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil."

"With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable."

"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me."

"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility."

"The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side."

"There has been talk about (The Blacks) revival. Angelou comments: "It was a very important play. It still is an important play. It implies that, come the revolution, Blacks will be as bad and as greedy as Whites have been. What goes around comes around, which is a very Black statement, an African statement, too. "Working for me as a young woman, with the cast of The Blacks, was an incredible experience. The original cast included Cecily (sic) Tyson, James Earl Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Charles Gordone, Helen Martin, Cynthia Belgrave, Jay Flash Riley, Lex Monson, Godfrey Cambridge, Ethel Ayler, and me. It was the thing to go into; if you were out of a job, go try out for The Blacks. It was wonderful to break down the play together. Obviously it fed all our artistic growth. "It would be interesting to see it today with some new people. All the [original] actors have done so many things since [that they] would bring so much other equipment to it now. Just like the time-instead of 1960-61, 1977 has its own rhythm and its own impetus."

"Tirer les marrons du feu avec la patte du chat."

"On ne meurt qu'une fois; et c'est pour si longtemps!"

"Je fais toujours bien le premier vers: mais j'ai peine à faire les autres."

"Le monde, chère Agnès, est une étrange chose."

"Une femme d'esprit est un diable en intrigue."

"Il y a fagots et fagots."

"Nous avons changé tout cela."

"J’enrage de bon cœur d’avoir tort, lorsque j’ai raison."

"Ah que je— Vous l'avez voulu, vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l'avez voulu, cela vous sied fort bien, et vous voilà ajusté comme il faut, vous avez justement ce que vous méritez."

"Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?"

"Ah! Il n'y a plus d'enfants!"

"Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes, et non pas de leurs maladies."

"Quare Opium facit dormire: … Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva."

"Si l’emploi de la comédie est de corriger les vices des hommes, je ne vois pas par quelle raison il y en aura de privilégiés. Celui-ci est, dans l’État, d’une conséquence bien plus dangereuse que tous les autres ; et nous avons vu que le théâtre a une grande vertu pour la correction. Les plus beaux traits d’une sérieuse morale sont moins puissants, le plus souvent, que ceux de la satire ; et rien ne reprend mieux la plupart des hommes que la peinture de leurs défauts. C’est une grande atteinte aux vices que de les exposer à la risée de tout le monde. On souffre aisément des répréhensions ; mais on ne souffre point la raillerie. On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule."

"Vous êtes un sot en trois lettres, mon fils."

"Contre la médisance il n'est point de rempart."

"Ceux de qui la conduite offre le plus à rire Sont toujours sur autrui les premiers à médire."

"À votre nez, mon frère, elle se rit de vous."

"Une femme a toujours une vengeance prête."

"Couvrez ce sein que je ne saurais voir. Par de pareils objets les âmes sont blessées."

"Pour être dévot, je n'en suis pas moins homme."

"Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense, Et ce n'est pas pécher que pécher en silence."

"Je l'ai vu, dis-je, de mes propres yeux vu."

"Sur quelque préférence une estime se fonde, Et c'est n'estimer rien qu'estimer tout le monde."

"Et c’est une folie, à nulle autre, seconde, De vouloir se mêler de corriger le monde."

"C'est un parleur étrange, et qui trouve toujours L'art de ne vous rien dire avec de grands discours."

"Que de son cuisinier il s'est fait un mérite, Et que c'est à sa table à qui l'on rend visite."

"On voit qu'il se travaille à dire de bons mots."

"Plus on aime quelqu'un, moins il faut qu'on le flatte: À rien pardonner le pur amour éclate."

"Les doutes sont fâcheux plus que toute autre chose."

"On peut être honnête homme et faire mal des vers."

"Si de probité tout était revêtu, Si tous les cœurs était francs, justes et dociles, La plupart des vertus nous seraient inutiles, Puisqu'on en met l'usage à pouvoir sans ennui Supporter dans nos droits l'injustice d'autrui."

"C'est un merveilleux assaisonnement aux plaisirs qu'on goûte que la présence des gens qu'on aime."

"J'aime mieux un vice commode, Qu'une fatigante vertu."

"Le véritable Amphitryon, Est l'Amphitryon où l'on dine."

"Le Seigneur Jupiter sait dorer la pilule."

"[J]e veux que tu me dises à qui lu parles quand lu dis cela. Je parle... je parle à mon bonnet."

"Les beaux yeux de ma cassette."

"Vous parlez devant un homme à qui tout Naples est connu."

"Tout ce qui n'est point prose, est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers, est prose."

"Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien."

"Ah, la belle chose que de savoir quelque chose."

"Jurons, ma belle, Une ardeur éternelle."

"Je le soutiendrai devant tout le monde."

"La grammaire qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois."

"Il est de sel attique assaisonné partout."

"Un sot savant est sot plus qu'un sot ignorant."

"Il faut manger pour vivre, et non pas vivre pour manger."

"But Comedy justly treated, as you find it in Molière, whom we so clownishly mishandled, the Comedy of Molière throws no infamous reflection upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous. Molière has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Bélise. He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense, rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French Plays; but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Molière, there is no scandal in the comparison."

"From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step."

"If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him."

"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space — all, it may be, are no more than a point."

"As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in question produce the same effect on us as the lack of sight produces in the blind man? All our virtues depend on the faculty of the senses, and on the degree to which external things affect us. Thus I do not doubt that, except for the fear of punishment, many people would not feel any remorse for killing a man from a distance at which he appeared no larger than a swallow. No more, at any rate, than they would for slaughtering a cow up close. If we feel compassion for a horse that suffers, but if we squash an ant without any scruple, isn’t the same principle at work?"

"When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner."

"Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things."

"Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée."

"There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies."

"Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man — it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country."

"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid."

"L'esprit de l'escalier"

"It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none."

"Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land."

"As for our celebrated lawgivers, who have cast us in our present awkward mold, you may be sure that they have acted to serve their interests and not ours. Witness all our political, civil, and religious institutions — examine them thoroughly: unless I am very much mistaken, you will see how, through the ages, the human race has been broken to the halter that a handful of rascals were itching to impose. Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control."

"The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum."

"How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!"

"I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don’t remember ever having seen one weep."

"Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey."

"Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois."

"The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!"

"Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory."

"The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find."

"[Africans are] always vicious... mostly inclined to lasciviousness, vengeance, theft and lies."

"Distance is a great promoter of admiration!"

"We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates."

"Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other."

"There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it."

"I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself.... The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here.... I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me.... To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going ..."

"I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God."

"There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint."

"Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others."

"[Jews are] angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them."

"When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music."

"To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!"

"The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children."

"On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve."

"There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father"

"We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded."

"Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism."

"Scepticism is the first step towards truth."

"To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature."

"To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him."

"We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,—causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this."

"This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will."

"Aucun homme n'a recu de la nature le droit de commander aux autres. La liberté est un présent du ciel, et chaque individu de la meme espèce a le droit d'en jouir aussitòt qu'il jouit de la raison."

"La puissance qui s'acquiert par la violence n'est qu'une usurpation, et ne dure qu'autant que la force de celui qui commande l'emporte sur celle de ceux qui obéissent."

"The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual."

"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace causes the Christian to act, reason the philosopher. Other men are carried away by their passions, their actions not being preceded by reflection: these are the men who walk in darkness. On the other hand, the philosopher, even in his passions, acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles from an infinity of particular observations. Most people adopt principles without thinking of the observations that have produced them, they believe the maxims exist, so to speak, by themselves. But the philosopher takes maxims from their source; he examines their origin; he knows their proper value, and he makes use of them only in so far as they suit him. Truth is not for the philosopher a mistress who corrupts his imagination and whom he believes to be found everywhere; he contents himself with being able to unravel it where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment... The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles..."

"Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general."

"The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come"

"If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare."

"Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower."

"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common."

"In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go."

"The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort."

"The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled."

"Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth."

"It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it."

"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."

"When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them."

"Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste."

"Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to."

"If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t deny a kind of respect for the great criminal."

"Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices."

"People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm."

"Je m’entretiens avec moi-même de politique, d’amour, de goût ou de philosophie ; j’abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage ; je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente … Mes pensées ce sont mes catins."

"La reconnaissance est un fardeau, et tout fardeau est fait pour être secoué."

"We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter."

"If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother."

"What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls."

"All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs."

"We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves."

"Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion."

"Égaré dans une forêt immense pendant la nuit, je n’ai qu’une petite lumière pour me conduire. Survient un inconnu qui me dit : Mon ami, souffle ta bougie pour mieux trouver ton chemin. Cet inconnu est un théologien. — No VIII"

"Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs."

"[L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes..."

"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all."

"Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad."

"Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it."

"The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population."

"The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action."

"The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law."

"The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me."

"The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion."

"There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side."

"Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high."

"How did they meet? By chance, like everybody … Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?"

"How easy it is to tell tales!"

"The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!"

"Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine."

"Good music is very close to primitive language."

"The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned."

"It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire."

"There is only one passion, the passion for happiness."

"The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice."

"Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man."

"If I had believed him, everything would have been turned upside down... all would have been turned topsy-turvy to make room for impractical theories."

"If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the "enthusiasm for truth and justice" — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot."

"Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it."

"Of course it would not do for the church to allow a man to die in peace who had added to the intellectual wealth of the world. The moment Diderot was dead, Catholic priests began painting and recounting the horrors of his expiring moments. They described him as overcome with remorse, as insane with fear; and these falsehoods have been repeated by the Protestant world, and will probably be repeated by thousands of ministers after we are dead. The truth is, he had passed his threescore years and ten. He had lived for seventy-one years. He had eaten his supper. He had been conversing with his wife. He was reclining in his easy chair. His mind was at perfect rest. He had entered, without knowing it, the twilight of his last day. Above the horizon was the evening star, telling of sleep. The room grew still and the stillness was lulled by the murmur of the street. There were a few moments of perfect peace. The wife said, "He is asleep." She enjoyed his repose, and breathed softly that he might not be disturbed. The moments wore on, and still he slept. Lovingly, softly, at last she touched him. Yes, he was asleep. He had become a part of the eternal silence."

"I don't understand how a man of good sense can accept for a single moment the sentence of the philosopher Diderot. It may well be high-sounding and incisive, it is nonetheless absurd and false. An who does not see, on the contrary, that it is not possible for the wicked man to love living alone and with himself? He would feel himself in company that is too bad, he would be too ill at ease, he would not be able to bear it for very long, or else, with his dominant passion remaining idle, it would have to die out and he would become good again. Amour-propre, the principle of all wickedness, is revived and thrives in society, which cause it to be born and where one is forced to compare oneself at each instant. It languishes and dies for want of nourishment in solitude. Whoever suffices to himself does not want to harm anyone at all. This maxim is less resounding and less arrogant, but more sensible and more just than that of the philosopher Diderot, and preferable at least in that it does not tend to offend anyone."

"Clichés are the armature of the Absolute. (Source: Alfred Jarry, Selected Works, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. Cape, London, 1965)."

"The work of art, by definition, is a stuffed crocodile. [L'objet d'art, par définition, est le crocodile empaillé.] (Source: Alfred Jarry, Selected Works, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. Cape, London, 1965)."

"That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization."

"There are now many invisible people on stage."

"All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion."

"We are all Victims of Duty."

"I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all."

"Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!"

"I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa."

"Every work of art (unless it is a pseudo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them."

"Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true."

"Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately."

"I am not capitulating."

"‘It was a lot of fuss about nothing, wasn’t it?’"

"I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me."

"I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream."

"It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question."

"But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity."

"I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me."

"It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think."

"Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician."

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

"It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind."

"Dieu est mort, Marx est mort et moi-même je ne me sens pas très bien"

"Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui J'espère : Jesus-Christ."

"Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been."

"We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores — its anti-Semitism for example. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r’s as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure."

"I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, “Take off your hat when you see the flag!” I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?"

"It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide’s “Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas!” or Cocteau’s “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, “You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off!” Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn’t then."

"Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words."

"None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us."

"The most implacable enemies of culture — Rimbaud, Lautréamont, dadaism, surrealism — end up being assimilated and absorbed by it. They all wanted to destroy culture, at least organized culture, and now they’re part of our heritage. It’s culture and not the bourgeoisie, as has been alleged, that is capable of absorbing everything for its own nourishment. As for the oneiric element, that is due partly to surrealism, but to a larger extent due to personal taste and to Romanian folklore — werewolves and magical practices. For example, when someone is dying, women surround him and chant, “Be careful! Don’t tarry on the way! Don’t be afraid of the wolf; it is not a real wolf!”—exactly as in Exit the King. They do that so the dead man won’t stay in infernal regions.<!-- The same thing can be found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which had a great impact on me too. However, my deepest anxieties were awakened, or reactivated, through Kafka."

"Remembrance of Things Past is too long and difficult, and what is interesting is the seventh volume, Time Regained. Otherwise, Proust’s work is concerned with irony, social criticism, worldliness, and the passage of time, which are not my preoccupations."

"The purpose of the Collège was the demolition of culture, even of surrealism, which they considered too organized. But make no mistake, these people were graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and highly cultured. Their method was based on puns and practical jokes—le canular. There is a great tradition of puns in Anglo-Saxon literature — Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland — but not in French. So they adopted it. They believed that the science of sciences is the pataphysique and its dogma, le canular."

"We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane."

"The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day."

"The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well."

"I found ancestors, like Shakespeare, who said, in Macbeth, that the world is full of sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Macbeth is a victim of fate. So is Oedipus. But what happens to them is not absurd in the eyes of destiny, because destiny, or fate, has its own norms, its own morality, its own laws, which cannot be flouted with impunity. Oedipus sleeps with his Mummy, kills his Daddy, and breaks the laws of fate. He must pay for it by suffering. It is tragic and absurd, but at the same time it’s reassuring and comforting, since the idea is that if we don’t break destiny’s laws, we should be all right. Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory."

"You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don’t think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me."

"The French Revolution liberated people from the power of the aristocrats. But the bourgeoisie that took over represented the exploitation of man by man, and had to be destroyed — as in the Russian Revolution, which then degenerated into totalitarianism, Stalinism, and genocide. The more you make revolutions, the worse it gets. Man is driven by evil instincts that are often stronger than moral laws … there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free — which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust — the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack."

"You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world — which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it."

"Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism."

"I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois."

"It’s a play about the life and martyrdom of a modern saint, who has just been canonized by the Church — or is it beatified? Which comes first? I’m not sure. Anyway, his name was Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Pole, and he died in Auschwitz. They were going to send some prisoners to a mine, where they would die of hunger and thirst. Father Kolbe offered to go instead of a man who had a wife and children and didn’t want to die. That man is still alive. … It won’t matter to me at all whether the Church canonizes him or not. The important thing is that such a man existed. -->"

"People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil."

"I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process."

"I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature? Either way, my writing, the only thing I have ever succeeded in doing, is invalidated.-->"

"To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important. When I write “The train arrives at the station,” it is banal, but at the same time sensational, because it is invented."

"People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?"

"My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips."

"Over the past thirty years, Ionesco has been called a “tragic clown,” the “Shakespeare of the Absurd,” the “Enfant Terrible of the Avant-Garde,” and the “Inventor of the Metaphysical Farce” — epithets that point to his evolution from a young playwright at a tiny Left Bank theater to an esteemed member of the Académie Française."

"Most people readily exchange their nightly dreams for what passes as reality in the morning papers. Not Eugéne Ionesco. The celebrated playwright of the absurd prefers to dwell on his own private late late shows."

"Ionesco believes that the irrational is man's intuitive form of vision. Everything that claims to be rational and realistic is a distortion of that vision, a shield raised against the absurdity of existence."

"Le duc imita bientôt avec Bande-au-ciel la petite infamie de son ancien ami et il paria, quoique le vit fût énorme, d'avaler trois bouteilles de vin de sens froid pendant qu'on l'enculerait."

"Nos quatre libertins, à moitié ivres, mais résolus pourtant d'observer leurs lois, se contentèrent de baisers, d'attouchements, mais que leur tête libertine sut assaisonner de tous les raffinements de la débauche et de la lubricité."

"Le duc, le vit en l'air, serrait Augustine de bien près; il braillait, il jurait, il déraisonnait, et la pauvre petite, toute tremblante, se reculait toujours, comme la colombe devant l'oiseau de proie qui la guette et qui est près d'en faire sa capture."

"...there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people..."

"Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?"

"Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."

"I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts."

"Voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex, it is to you only that I offer this work; nourish yourselves upon its principles: they favor your passions, and these passions, whereof coldly insipid moralists put you in fear, are naught but the means Nature employs to bring man to the ends she prescribes to him; harken only to these delicious promptings, for no voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness."

"Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained."

"You young maidens, too long constrained by a fanciful Virtue's absurd and dangerous bonds and by those of a disgusting religion, imitate the fiery Eugénie; be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents."

"And you, amiable debauchees, you who since youth have known no limits but those of your desires and who have been governed by your caprices alone, study the cynical Dolmancé, proceed like him and go as far as he if you too would travel the length of those flowered ways your lechery prepares for you; in Dolmancé's academy be at last convinced it is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses' pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life."

"The pleasures I tried to deny myself of assailed my mind all the more ardently; and I saw that if a person is born, like me, to debauchery, it is useless to apply restraints: fiery desires will soon shattter them. Ultimately, my dear, I'm an amphibious creature: I love everything, I enjoy everything, I want to try all kinds of pleasures."

"We must pity those who have such singular tastes, but never insult them: their lack is a lack in nature. They are no more the masters of arriving in this world with bizarre tastes that we are the masters of arriving bowlegged or shapely. Besides, is a man saying something disagreeable to you when he reveals his desire to enjoy you? Absolutely not! He's paying you a compliment!"

"Modesty is an old-fashioned virtue, which, given your charms, you must certainly do without."

"A person must have lost his mind to believe in God. The product of either fear or weakness, this abominable phantom, Eugenie, is useless for the system of the earth, It would even be infallibly harmful. You see, its will, which must be just, could never ally itself with the injustice essential to the laws of nature. It would constantly have to wish for goodness, which nature desires only as compensation for the evil that serves its laws. It would have to act continuously, and nature, one of whose laws is that perpetual motion, could only rival and perpetually resist it."

"What do I see in the God of this infamous cult but a barbaric and inconsistent being, who creates a world one day, then repents its construction the next day? What do I see but a weak being who can never succeed in forming man according to his will? This creature, although deriving from hi, dominates him. And this creature can offend him, thereby deserving eternal tortures. What a weak being that God is!"

"Benevolence is more a vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul."

"No desire can be termed outlandish, my dear; all desires can be found in nature. When nature created human beings, it delighted in differentiating their sexual leanings as much as their faces; and we should no more be astonished by the diversity of our features than by the diversity that nature has placed in our affections."

"What good are laws without a religion? We need a religion so distant to that of Rome that we can never return to the religion of Rome. In this century we are furthermore convinced that religion must be based on morality and not morality on religion. Hence we require a reliigion that is faithful to morals, that is virtually their further development, their necessary consequence, and that, in uplifting the soul, can perpetually keep it on the acme of that precious freedom which is now its unique idol."

"Oh, you, who are clutching the sickle, give the tree of superstition its final stroke. Do not be content with hacking off the branches. Tear out by its roots a plant with such noxious effects."

"Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad—all these great scoundrels, all these big despots of our ideas knew how to bond their concocted divinities with their immense ambitions. Certain of captivating nations with the sanction of their gods, these villains, as we know, took care either to question their deities at an appropriate moment or to have them answer only whatever they believed could serve their purpose."

"Survey the histories of all nations. You will never see them exchange their form of government for a monarchy, given their gradation by superstition; you will always see kings supporting religion, and religion supporting kings."

"The total annihilation of divine worship, which we are spreading through Europe. We should not be content with shattering scepters, we must smash idols forever. There has never been more than one step from superstition to royalism."

"All religions concur in exalting the deep-seated wisdom and power of a divinity, but once its conduct is exposed, we find nothing but imprudence, weakness, and folly. God, we are told, created the world for himself, but so far he has failed to have the world honored appropriately. God created us to worship him, and we spend our days mocking him! What a wretched God he is!"

"Never will a free man bow to the gods of Christianity; never will its dogmas, never will its rites, never its mysteries, never its morals be suitable for a republican."

"The philosopher must teach these pupils [French students] that it is far less essential to understand nature than to enjoy and respect its laws; that these laws are both wise and simple; that they are written in all human hearts, and that one need merely question a heart in order to appreciate its impulses."

"Let us leave off believing that religion can be useful to man. Instead, let us have good laws, and we can then do without religion."

"The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold."

"You charming sex, you will be free; like men, you will enjoy all the delights that nature has made your obligations; you will not have to be constrained in any pleasure. Must the more divine section of humanity be clapped in irons by the less divine section? Ah, smash those chains—nature wants you to smash them! You should have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other morals than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts."

"The road we have traveled after 1789 has been far more arduous than the road still lying ahead of us, and in regard to what I now propose, we do not need to affect public opinion anywhere as deeply as we have tormented it in every way since the storming of the Bastille. Believe me, a nation that was wise enough, courageous enough to conduct an insolent monarch from the pinnacle of his grandeurs to the feet of the scaffold; a nation that, within a few short years, has managed to vanquish so many prejudices, managed enough wisdom and courage to sacrifice for the good of the cause, for the prosperity of the republic, to immolate a phantom far more illusory than any king could ever be."

"All our ideas are representations of the objects that affect our senses; then what can be represented by the idea of God, which is obviously an idea without an object? Isn't such an idea, or will add, as impossible as effects without causes? Isn't an idea without a prototype anything but a chimera? Some Doctors of the Church, you will continue, assure us that the notion of God is innate, and that a man already has this notion in his mother's womb. But that is wrong, you will add; every principle is a judgement, every judgement is the result of experience, and experience can be gained only through the exercise of the senses. And it thereby follows that religious principles are obviously based on nothing and are not innate at all. How, you will go on, could anyone persuade rational beings that the hardest thing to grasp was the most essential thing for them? They were terrified; and when you are terrified, you are no longer rational. Above all, they were told to distrust their reasoning; and when the brains are muddled, you believe everything and examine nothing. Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religions."

"Let nobody doubt that religions are the cradles of despotism. The first of all despots was a priest; the first king and the first emperor of Rome, Numa and Augustus, both allied themselves with the priesthood; Constantine and Clovis were abbots rather than sovereigns; Heliopolis was the priest of the sun. In all times, in all centuries, despotism and religion have been so thoroughly interconnected that, as is easily demonstrated, in destroying one you undermine the other, for the profound reason that each will help the other to gain power."

"The first of these blessed charlatans to talk about God or religion will be condemned to being jeered at, scoffed at, covered with mud at all crossroads of the major French towns. If that scoundrel breaks that same law a second time, he will be locked away in an eternal prison. Let the most insulting blasphemies, the most atheistic writings be fully authorized, so that we may completely extirpate those horrifying toys of our childhoods from human hearts and memories. Let us hold a contest to find at last the text most capable of Enlightening Europeans about such a major subject; and let a substantial prize be established by the Nation as recompense for the man who, having said and proved everything about his theme, will leave his compatriots only a sickle to shatter all these phantoms and a straightforward heart to detest them."

"After demonstrating that theism is unsuitable for a republican government, I find it crucial to prove that French morals are likewise inappropriate."

"No act of possession can be exercised on a free being; it is as unjust to own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves. All men are born free, all are equal before the law; we must never lose sight of these principles. Hence, no sex is granted the legitimate right to seize the other sex exclusively, and never can any sex or any class possess the other arbitrarily."

"I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?... How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent."

"The reign of philosophy has finally annihilated that of imposture. Man is finally becoming enlightened and, destroying with one hand the frivolous playthings of a divine religion it raises with the other an altar to the divinity dearest to its heart. Reason replaces Mary in our temples, and the incense that burned at the knees of an adulterous woman will only be lighted anew at the feet of the goddess who smashed our chains."

"(what did you think of de Sade at that age, and later?) I don't like him at all, and he has had no influence in my life. I have not ended up a sadist or a masochist for having read his books."

"To sympathize with Sade is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection, and death that he desires; and every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex maniac, we take a stand against him. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves. He allows that a father may revenge or prevent, even by murder, the rape of his child. What he demands is that, in the struggle between irreconcilable existences, each one engage himself concretely. He approves of the vendetta, but not of the courts. We may kill, but we may not judge."

"Those leftists who champion Sade might do well to remember that prerevolutionary France was filled with starving people. The feudal system was both cruel and crude. The rights of the aristocracy to the labor and bodies of the poor were unchallenged and not challengeable. The tyranny of class was absolute. The poor sold what they could, including themselves, to survive. Sade learned and upheld the ethic of his class."

"The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution-the revolution which lies beyond politics an economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology-are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf."

"Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature."

"Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees."

"It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion."

"This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion.""

"To win a woman in the first place one must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her. Finally, so she will allow you to leave her, you've got to annoy her."

"The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life."

"When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome."

"A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible."

"Vous êtes avocat! Vous avez le devoir au contraire de recourir à toutes les ruses pour défendre vos clients. Au mensonge. A la calomnie."

"In wartime a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away."

"Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too."

"As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum."

"Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other — by their skins, their language, their smell: always jealous of each other, always hating each other — they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war."

"There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth."

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

"Qui dépense trop n’est jamais riche."

"Je suis un galérien de plume et d'encre."

"Tout pouvoir humain est un composé de patience et de temps."

"La gloire est le soleil des morts."

"L'égalité sera peut-être un droit, mais aucune puissance humaine ne saura le convertir en fait."

"Les hommes sont ainsi faits, ils résistent à une discussion sérieuse et tombent sous un regard."

"Vous savez quelles sont mes religions.Je ne suis point orthodoxe et ne crois pas à l'Église romaine. Je trouve que s'il ya quelque plan digne du sien, ce sont les transformations humaines faisant marcher l'être vers des zones inconnues.C'est la loi des créations qui nous sont inférieures : ce doit être la loi des créations supérieures.Le swedenborgisme, qui n'est qu'une répétition, dans le sens chrétien, d'anciennes idées, est ma religion, avec l'augmentation que j'y fais de l'incompréhensibilité de Dieu."

"Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting."

"Le courant des affaires devant toujours s'expédier, il surnage une certaine quantité de commis qui se sait indispensable quoique congéable à merci et qui veut rester en place. La bureaucratie, pouvoir gigantesque mis en mouvement par des nains, est née ainsi. Si en subordonnant toute chose et tout homme à sa volonté, Napoléon avait retardé pour un moment l'influence de la bureaucratie, ce rideau pesant placé entre le bien à faire et celui qui peut l'ordonner, elle s'était définitivement organisée sous le gouvernement constitutionnel, nécessairement ami des médiocrités, grand amateur de pièces probantes et de comptes, enfin tracassier comme une petite bourgeoise."

"Il y a deux musiques : une petite, mesquine, de second ordre, partout semblable à elle-même, qui repose sur une centaine de phrases que chaque musicien s'approprie, et qui constitue un bavardage plus ou moins agréable avec lequel vivent la plupart des compositeurs."

"Les hivers sont pour les femmes à la mode ce que fut jadis une campagne pour les militaires de l’empire."

"Lorsque les femmes nous aiment, elles nous pardonnent tout, même nos crimes ; lorsqu'elles ne nous aiment pas, elles ne nous pardonnent rien, pas même nos vertus !"

"On amplifie également le malheur et le bonheur, nous ne sommes jamais ni si malheureux, ni si heureux qu'on le dit."

"Une jeune fille est comme une fleur qu'on a cueillie ; mais la femme coupable est une fleur sur laquelle on a marché."

"Malheureusement, ce portrait ne corrigera personne de la manie d’aimer de anges au doux sourire, à l’air rêveur, à figure candide, dont le cœur est un coffre-fort."

"Tuer un parent de qui l’on se plaint, c’est quelque chose ; mais hériter de lui, c’est là un plaisir !"

"Je voudrais, un jour, avoir un nom si connu, si populaire, si célèbre, si glorieux enfin, qu'il m'authorisât, à p[éter] dans le monde, et que le monde trouvât ça tout naturel."

"Le mariage est un combat à outrage avant lequel les deux époux demandent au ciel sa bénédiction, parce que s'aimer toujours est la plus téméraire des entreprises ; le combat ne tarde pas à commencer, et la victoire, c'est-à-dire la liberté, demeure au plus adroit."

"Il y a des femmes dont la grossesse fait sourire quelque célibataire sournois."

"Qui ne voudrait pas rester persuadé que ces femmes sont vertueuses ? Ne sont-elles pas la fleur du pays ? Ne sont-elles pas toutes verdissantes, ravissantes, étourdissantes de beauté, de jeunesse, de vie et d'amour ? Croire à leur vertu est une espèce de religion sociale ; car elles sont l'ornement du monde et font la gloire de la France."

"Flâner est une science, c'est la gastronomie de l'œil.Se promener, c'est végéter ; flâner, c'est vivre... Flâner, c'est jouir, c'est recueillir des traits d'esprit, c'est admirer de sublimes tableaux de malheur, d'amour, de joie, des portraits gracieux ou grotesques ; c'est plonger ses regards au fond de mille existences : jeune, c'est tout désirer, tout posséder ; vieillard, c'est vivre de la vie des jeunes gens, c'est épouser leurs passions."

"Les moeurs sont l'hypocrisie des nations."

"La vertu des femmes est peut-être une question de tempérament."

"Les femmes les plus vertueuses ont en elles quelque chose qui n'est jamais chaste."

"L'amour est la plus mélodieuse de toutes les harmonies, et nous en avons le sentiment inné.La femme est un délicieux instrument de plaisir, mais il faut en connaitre les frémissantes cordes, en étudier la pose, le clavier timide, le doigté changeant et capricieux."

"Un homme ne peut se marier sans avoir étudié l'anatomie et disséqué une femme au moins."

"La puissance ne consiste pas à frapper fort ou souvent, mais à frapper juste."

"Il est plus facile d'être amant que mari, par la raison qu'il est plus difficile d'avoir de l'esprit tous les jours que de dire de jolies choses de temps en temps."

"Plus on juge, moins on aime."

"La femme est une propriété que l'on acquiert par contrat, elle est mobilière, car la possession vaut titre ; enfin, la femme n'est, à proprement parler, qu'une annexe de l'homme ; or, tranchez, coupez, rognez, elle vous appartient à tous les titres."

"Ainsi ne vous laissez jamais séduire par la fausse bonhomie des lits jumeaux. C'est l'invention la plus sotte, la plus perfide et la plus dangereuse qui soit au monde. Honte et anathème à qui l'imagina !"

"Avoir sa belle-mère en province quand on demeure à Paris, et vice versa, est une de ces bonnes fortunes qui se rencontrent toujours trop rarement."

"La vie n'est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l'argent imprime le mouvement ?"

"Quels effroyables tableaux ne présenteraient pas les âmes de ceux qui environnent les lits funèbres, si l'on pouvait en peindre les idées ? Et toujours la fortune est le mobile des intrigues qui s'élaborent, des plans qui se forment, des trames qui s'ourdissent !"

"Or les trois classes d'être créés par les mœurs sont : L'homme qui travaille ; L'homme qui pense ; L'homme qui ne fait rien."

"Une déchirure est un malheur, une tache est un vice."

"Entre le joueur du matin et le joueur du soir il existe la différence qui distingue le mari nonchalant de l'amant pâmé sous les fenêtres de sa belle."

"Il existe je ne sais quoi de grand et d'épouvantable dans le suicide."

"La pensée est la clef de tous les trésors, elle procure les joies de l'avare sans donner ses soucis. Aussi ai-je plané sur le monde, où mes plaisirs ont toujours été des jouissances intellectuelles."

"Le mal n'est peut-être qu'un violent plaisir. Qui pourrait déterminer le point où la volupté devient un mal et celui où le mal est encore la volupté ? Les plus vives lumières du monde idéal ne caressent-elles pas la vue, tandis que les plus douces ténèbres du monde physique la blessent toujours."

"Quand le despotisme est dans les lois, la liberté se trouve dans les mœurs, et vice versa."

"Le bonheur ne vient-il donc pas de l'âme ?"

"Je te le déclare, en mon âme et conscience, la conquête du pouvoir ou d'une grande renommée littéraire me paraissait un triomphe moins difficile à obtenir qu'un succès auprès d'une femme de haut rang, jeune, spirituelle et gracieuse."

"Pour juger un homme, au moins faut-il être dans le secret de sa pensée, de ses malheurs, de ses émotions ; ne vouloir connaître de sa vie que les événements matériels, c'est faire de la chronologie, l'histoire des sots !"

"Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie ?"

"L'amour abstrait ne suffit pas à un homme pauvre et grand, il en veut tous les dévouements... La véritable épouse en cœur, en chair et en os, se laisse traîner là où va celui en qui réside sa vie, sa force, sa gloire, son bonheur."

"La faute des hommes supérieurs est de dépenser leurs jeunes années à se rendre dignes de la faveur. Pendant qu'ils thésaurisent, leur force est la science pour porter sans effort le poids d'une puissance qui les fuit ; les intrigants, riches de mots et dépourvus d'idées, vont et viennent, surprennent les sots, et se logent dans la confiance des demi-niais."

"Le calme et le silence nécessaires au savant ont je ne sais quoi de doux, d'enivrant comme l'amour. L'exercice de la pensée, la recherche des idées, les contemplations tranquilles de la science nous prodiguent d'ineffables délices, indescriptibles comme tout ce qui participe de l'intelligence, dont les phénomènes sont invisibles à nos sens extérieurs."

"L'étude prête une sorte de magie à tout ce qui nous environne."

"La vie d'un homme occupé à manger sa fortune devient souvent une spéculation ; il place ses capitaux en amis, en plaisirs, en protecteurs, en connaissances."

"L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui rivière, qui fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect à chaque flot, et se jette dans un incommensurable océan où les esprits incomplets voient la monotonie, où les grandes âmes s'abîment en de perpétuelles contemplations."

"Un homme sans passion et sans argent reste maître de sa personne ; mais un malheureux qui aime ne s'appartient plus et ne peut pas se tuer. L'amour nous donne une sorte de religion pour nous-mêmes, nous respectons en nous une autre vie ; il devient alors le plus horrible des malheurs."

"Notre conscience est un juge infaillible, quand nous ne l'avons pas encore assassinée."

"Les musiciennes sont presque toujours amoureuses. Celle qui chantait ainsi devait savoir bien aimer."

"Les gens sans esprit ressemblent aux mauvaises herbes qui se plaisent dans les bons terrains, et ils aiment d'autant plus être amusés qu'ils s'ennuient eux-mêmes."

"Les vieilles filles n'ayant pas fait plier leur caractère et leur vie à une autre vie ni à d'autres caractères, comme l'exige la destinée de la femme, ont, pour la plupart, la manie de vouloir tout faire plier autour d'elles."

"Entre personnes sans cesse en présence, la haine et l'amour vont toujours croissant : on trouve à tout moment des raisons pour s'aimer ou se haïr mieux."

"La vie habituelle fait l'âme, et l'âme fait la physionomie."

"Penser, c'est voir ! me dit-il un jour emporté par une de nos objections sur le principe de notre organisation. Toute science humaine repose sur la déduction, qui est une vision lente par laquelle on descend de la cause à l'effet, par laquelle on remonte de l'effet à la cause ; ou, dans une plus large expression, toute poésie comme toute oeuvre d'art procède d'une rapide vision des choses."

"Je préfère la pensée à l'action, une idée à une affaire, la contemplation au mouvement."

"It is impossible any longer to question the priority of the Asiatic writings over our Holy Scriptures. For those who are able to admit this historical fact in good faith, the world grows astonishingly greater. Was it not on a plateau in Asia that the few men who survived the cataclysm found refuge? .. The history of the origin of man in the Bible is only the genealogy of a swarm which came out of the human hive hanging on the mountain- sides of Tibet between the summits of Himalaya and the Caucasus. . . . A great history rests beneath these names of men and places, behind these fictions which attract us irresistibly without our knowing why. Perhaps we breathe in them the air of our new humanity."

"In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from hand to have wit, science or opinion."

"La discrétion est le plus habile des calculs."

"Le lendemain Rastignac s'habilla fort élégamment, et alla, vers trois heures de l'après-midi, chez madame de Restaud, en se livrant pendant la route à ces espérances étourdiment folles qui rendent la vie des jeunes gens si belle d'émotions : ils ne calculent alors ni les obstacles ni les dangers, ils voient en tout le succès, poétisent leur existence par le seul jeu de leur imagination, et se font malheureux ou tristes par le renversement de projets qui ne vivaient encore que dans leurs désirs effrénés; s'ils n'étaient pas ignorants et timides, le monde social serait impossible."

"Notre cœur est un trésor, videz-le d'un coup, vous êtes ruinés. Nous ne pardonnons pas plus à un sentiment de s'être montré tout entier qu'à un homme de ne pas avoir un sou à lui."

""Je réussirai !" Le mot du joueur, du grand capitaine, mot fataliste qui perd plus d'hommes qu'il n'en sauve."

"L'homme est imparfait. Il est parfois plus ou moins hypocrite, et les niais disent alors qu'il a ou n'a pas de mœurs."

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait."

"— Je suis tourmenté par de mauvaises idées. — En quel genre ? Ça se guérit, les idées. - Comment ? - En y succombant."

"If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment — giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe."

"Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love."

"Man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy."

"The tiniest flower is a thought, — a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition."

"Clouds signify the veil of the Most High."

"Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things have a voice for the Spirit."

"Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all."

"We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men."

"The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us."

"Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?"

"White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light."

"Le véritable amour est éternel, infini, toujours semblable à lui-même ; il est égal et pur, sans démonstrations violentes ; il se voit en cheveux blancs, toujours jeune de cœur."

"Mes avis sur vos relations avec les femmes sont aussi dans ce mot de chevalerie : Les servir toutes, n'en aimer qu'une."

"Un jeune homme est au crime ce qu'une pièce de cent sous est au X."

"Il faisait le ménage comme Philopémen sciait son bois, en communiquant à toutes ses actions la simplicité du faire, en y gardant sa dignité, car il semblait comprendre que le but ennoblissait tout."

"Les filles élevées comme vous l'avez été, dans la contrainte et les pratiques religieuses, ont soif de la liberté, désirent le bonheur, et le bonheur dont elles jouissent n'est jamais aussi grand ni aussi beau que celui qu'elles ont rêvé. De pareilles filles font de mauvaises femmes."

"La tyrannie produit deux effets contraires dont les symboles existent dans deux grandes figures de l'esclavage antique : Epictète et Spartacus, la haine et ses sentiments mauvais, la résignation et ses tendresses chrétiennes."

"Les mères de famille devraient rechercher de pareils hommes pour leurs filles : l'Esprit est protecteur comme la Divinité, le Désenchantement est perspicace comme un chirurgien, l'Expérience est prévoyante comme une mère. Ces trois sentiments sont les vertus théologales du mariage."

"L'homme qui peut empreindre perpétuellement la pensée dans le fait est un homme de génie ; mais l'homme qui a le plus de génie ne le déploie pas à tous les instants, il ressemblerait trop à Dieu."

"La bonté n'est pas sans écueils : on l'attribue au caractère, on veut rarement y reconnaître les efforts secrets d'une belle âme, tandis qu'on récompense les gens méchants du mal qu'ils ne font pas."

"Cette bonhomie apparente qui séduit les nouveaux venus et n'empêche aucune trahison, qui se permet et justifie tout, qui jette les hauts cris à une blessure et la pardonne, est un des caractères distinctifs du journaliste. Cette camaraderie, mot créé par un homme d'esprit, corrode les plus belles âmes : elle rouille leur fierté, tue le principe des grandes œuvres, et consacre la lâcheté de l'esprit."

"A quinze ans, ni la beauté ni le talent n'existent : une femme est tout promesse."

"D'ailleurs, le suicide régnait alors à Paris ; ne doit-il pas être le dernier mot des sociétés incrédules ?"

"Il y a une manière de dire ce mot rien entre amants, qui signifie tout le contraire."

"Nous [les hommes] valons moins que vous [les femmes]."

"Aucun homme ne s'arrache aux douceurs du sommeil matinal pour écouter un troubadour en veste, une fille seule se réveille à un chant d'amour."

"Comme beaucoup de veuves, elle eut l'idée malsaine de se remarier."

"La province est la province : elle est ridicule quand elle veut singer Paris."

"Les villes se relèvent aussi difficilement que les maisons de commerce de leur ruine."

"Les petits esprits ont besoin de despotisme pour le jeu de leurs nerfs, comme les grandes âmes ont soif d'égalité pour l'action du cœur. Or les êtres étroits s'étendent aussi bien par la persécution que par la bienfaisance ; ils peuvent s'attester leur puissance par un empire ou cruel ou charitable sur autrui, mais ils vont du côté où les pousse leur tempérament. Ajoutez le véhicule de l'intérêt, et vous aurez l'énigme de la plupart des choses sociales."

"Les souffrances disposent à la dévotion, et presque toutes les jeunes filles, poussées par une tendresse instinctive, inclinent au mysticisme, le côté profond de la religion."

"Pierrette fit comme les gens qui souffrent au delà de leurs forces, elle garda le silence.Ce silence est, pour tous les êtres attaqués, le seul moyen de triompher : il lasse les charges cosaques des envieux, les sauvages escarmouches des ennemis ; il donne une victoire écrasante et complète. Quoi de plus complet que le silence ? Il est absolu, n'est-ce pas une des manières d'être de l'infini ?"

"Le monde offre énormément d’énigmes dont le mot paraît difficile à trouver. Il y a des intrigues multipliées."

"Qui parle trop veut tromper."

"L’homme qui nous parle est l’amant, l’homme qui ne nous parle plus est le mari."

"La politesse cache très-imparfaitement l’égoïsme général."

"Un pays est fort quand il se compose de familles riches, dont tous les membres sont intéressés à la défense du trésor commun : trésor d’argent, de gloire, de priviléges, de jouissances ; il est faible quand il se compose d’individus non solidaires, auxquels il importe peu d’obéir à sept hommes ou à un seul, à un Russe ou à un Corse, pourvu que chaque individu garde son champ ; et ce malheureux égoïste ne voit pas qu’un jour on le lui ôtera."

"L’homme subjugué par sa femme est justement couvert de ridicule. L’influence d’une femme doit être entièrement secrète."

"Le propre d’un grand homme est de dérouter les calculs ordinaires. Il est sublime et attendrissant, naïf et gigantesque."

"Oh ! voilà l’amour vrai, sans chicanes : il est ou n’est pas ; mais quand il est, il doit se produire dans son immensité."

"La vertu, mignonne, est un principe dont les manifestations diffèrent selon les milieux : la vertu de Provence, celle de Constantinople, celle de Londres et celle de Paris ont des effets parfaitement dissemblables sans cesser d’être la vertu."

"Il y a deux amours : celui qui commande et celui qui obéit ; ils sont distincts et donnent naissance à deux passions, et l’une n’est pas l’autre."

"L’amour est le plus joli larcin que la Société ait su faire à la Nature ; mais la maternité, n’est-ce pas la Nature dans sa joie ? Un sourire a séché mes larmes."

"Le hasard, ma chère, est le dieu de la maternité."

"Les mondes doivent se rattacher à Dieu comme un enfant se rattache à toutes les fibres de sa mère : Dieu, c’est un grand cœur de mère. Il n’y a rien de visible, ni de perceptible dans la conception, ni même dans la grossesse ; mais être nourrice,... c’est un bonheur de tous les moments."

"La joie d’une mère est une lumière qui jaillit jusque sur l’avenir et le lui éclaire, mais qui se reflète sur le passé pour lui donner le charme des souvenirs."

"Ah ! combien de choses un enfant apprend à sa mère. Il y a tant de promesses faites entre nous et la vertu dans cette protection incessante due à un être faible, que la femme n’est dans sa véritable sphère que quand elle est mère ; elle déploie alors seulement ses forces, elle pratique les devoirs de sa vie, elle en a tous les bonheurs et tous les plaisirs."

"Un an de lait suffit. Les enfants qui tettent trop deviennent des sots. Je suis pour les dictons populaires."

"La maternité comporte une suite de poésies douces ou terribles. Pas une heure qui n’ait ses joies et ses craintes."

"Une vraie mère n’est pas libre."

"La science de la mère comporte des mérites silencieux, ignorés de tous, sans parade, une vertu en détail, un dévouement de toutes les heures."

"On porte encore moins facilement la joie excessive que la peine la plus lourde."

"L’amour est profondément égoïste, tandis que la maternité tend à multiplier nos sentiments."

"Il n’y a que des enfants aimants et aimés qui puissent consoler une femme de la perte de sa beauté."

"La mort rapproche autant qu’elle sépare, elle fait taire les passions mesquines."

"En France, et dans la partie la plus grave de l'histoire moderne, aucune femme, si ce n'est Brunehault ou Frédégonde, n'a plus souffert des erreurs populaires que Catherine de Médicis ; tandis que Marie de Médicis, dont toutes les actions on été préjudiciables à la France, échappe à la honte qui devrait couvrir son nom... Catherine de Médicis, au contraire, a sauvé la couronne de France ; elle a maintenu l'authorité royale dans des des circonstances au milieur desquelles plus d'un grand prince aurait succombé.Ayant en tête des factieux et des ambitions comme celles des Guise et de la maison de Bourbon, des hommes commes les deux cardinaux de Lorraine et comme les deux Balafrés, les deux princes de Condé, la reine Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV, le connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, les Coligny, Théodore de Bèze, il lui a fallu déployer les plus rares qualités, les plus précieux dons de l'homme d'État, sous le feu des railleries de la presse calviniste."

"Le pouvoir est une action, et le principe électif est la discussion.Il n'y a pas de politique possible avec la discussion en permanence."

"Qui dit examen, dit révolte.Toute révolte est, ou le manteau sous lequel se cache un prince, ou les langes d'une domination nouvelle."

"Pierre l'Ermite, Calvin et Robespierre, chacun à trois cents ans de distance, ces trois Picards ont été, politiquement parlant, des leviers d'Archimède.C'était à chaque époque une pensée qui recontrait un point d'appel dans les intérêts et chez les hommes."

"Il est certain que pendant le seizième siècle, dans les années qui le précédèrent et le suivirent, l'empoisonnement était arrivé à une perfection inconnue à la chimie moderne et que l'histoire a constatée. L'Italie, berceau des sciences modernes, fut, à cette époque, inventrice et maîtresse de ces secrets dont plusieurs se perdirent."

"A ceux qui ont épuisé la politique, il ne reste plus que la pensée pure."

"Quand la religion et la royauté seront abattues, le peuple en viendra aux grands, après les grands il s'en prendra aux riches."

"Les idées dévorent les siècles comme les hommes sont dévorés par leurs passions. Quand l'homme sera guéri, l'humanité se guérira peut-être."

"Nos plus cruels ennemis sont nos proches... Les rois n'ont ni frères, ni fils, ni mère."

"La liberté politique, la tranquillité d'une nation, la science même, sont des présents pour lesquels le destin prélève des impôts de sang !"

"L’épicier est entraîné vers son commerce par une force attractive égale à la force de répulsion qui en éloigne les artistes.On n’a pas assez étudié les forces sociales qui constituent les diverses vocations. Il serait curieux de savoir ce qui détermine un homme à se faire papetier plutôt que boulanger, du moment où les fils ne succèdent pas forcément au métier de leur père comme chez les Egyptiens."

"Une veuve a deux tâches dont les obligations se contredisent : elle est mère et doit exercer la puissance paternelle."

"La lucidité, de même que les rayons du soleil, n’a d’effet que par la fixité de la ligne droite, elle ne devine qu’à la condition de ne pas rompre son regard ; elle se trouble dans les sautillements de la chance."

"Il y a deux timidités : la timidité d’esprit, la timidité de nerfs ; une timidité physique et une timidité morale. L’une est indépendante de l’autre. Le corps peut avoir peur et trembler pendant que l’esprit reste calme et courageux, et vice versa. Ceci donne la clef de bien des bizarreries morales. Quand les deux timidités se réunissent chez un homme, il sera nul pendant toute sa vie."

"La passion qui, remarquez-le, porte son esprit avec elle, peut donner aux niais, aux sots, aux imbéciles une sorte d’intelligence, surtout pendant la jeunesse."

"Les jeunes filles se créent souvent de nobles, de ravissantes images, des figures tout idéales, et se forgent des idées chimériques sur les hommes, sur les sentiments, sur le monde ; puis elles attribuent innocemment à un caractère les perfections qu'elles ont rêvées, et s'y confient."

"Il y a beaucoup d'hommes dont le cœur est puissamment ému par la seule apparence de la souffrance chez une femme : pour eux la douleur semble être une promesse de constance ou d'amour."

"Un enfant, monsieur, n'est-il pas l'image de deux êtres, le fruit de deux sentiments librement confondus ?"

"La jeune fille n'a qu'une coquetterie, et croit avoir tout dit quand elle a quitté son vêtement ; mais la femme en a d'innombrables et se cache sous mille voiles ; enfin elle caresse toutes les vanités, et la novice n'en flatte qu'une. Il s'émeut d'ailleurs des indécisions, des terreurs, des craintes, des troubles et des orages chez la femme de trente ans, qui ne se rencontrent jamais dans l'amour d'une jeune fille.Arrivée à cet âge, la femme demande à un jeune homme de lui restituer l'estime qu'elle lui a sacrifiée ; elle ne vit que pour lui, s'occupe de son avenir, lui veut une belle vie, la lui ordonne glorieuse ; elle obéit, elle prie et commande, s'abaisse et s'élève, et sait consoler en mille occasions, où la jeune fille ne sait que gémir."

"La sainteté des femmes est inconciliable avec les devoirs et les libertés du monde. Emanciper les femmes, c'est les corrompre."

"Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour."

"Mais la raison est toujours mesquine auprès du sentiment ; l'une est naturellement bornée, comme tout ce qui est positif, et l'autre est infini."

"L'amour a son instinct, il sait trouver le chemin du cœur comme le plus faible insecte marche à sa fleur avec une irrésistible volonté qui ne s'épouvante de rien."

"Rien n'est-il si discret qu'un jeune visage, parce que rien n'est plus immobile. La figure d'une jeune femme a le calme, le poli, la fraîcheur de la surface d'un lac. La physionomie des femmes ne commence qu'à trente ans."

"Qu'est-ce que l'Art, monsieur ? C'est la Nature concentrée."

"Aussi tous avaient-ils besoin d'oublier et leur malheur et leur pensée qui doublait le malheur."

"La Pratique parlait son langage positif à la Théorie dont la parole est toujours au Futur."

"History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle."

"La loi est bonne, elle est nécessaire, l'exécution en est mauvaise, et les mœurs jugent les lois d'après la manière dont elles s'exécutent."

"Le crime et la folie ont quelque similitude. Voir les prisonniers de la Conciergerie au préau, ou voir des fous dans le jardin d'une maison de santé, c'est une même chose. Les uns et les autres se promènent en s'évitant, se jettent des regards au moins siguliers, atroces, selon leurs pensées du moment, jamais gais ni sérieux ; car ils se connaissent ou ils se craignent. L'attente d'une condamnation, les remords, les anxiétés donnent aux promeneurs du préau l'air inquiet et hagard des fous. Les criminels consommés ont seuls une assurance qui ressemble à la tranquillité d'une vie honnête, à la sincérité d'une conscience pure."

"Le fer cède à certains degrés de battage ou de pression réitérée ; ses impénétrables molécules, purifiées par l'homme et rendues homogènes, se désagrègent ; et, sans être en fusion, le métal n'a plus la même vertu de résistance. Les maréchaux, les serruriers, les taillandiers, tous les ouvriers qui travaillent constamment ce métal en expriment alors l'état par un mot de leur techonologie : "Le fer est roui !" disent-ils en s'appropriant cette expression exclusivement consacrée au chanvre, dont la désorganisation s'obtient par le rouissage. Eh bien, l'âme humaine, ou, si vous voulez la triple énergie du corps, du cœur et de l'esprit se trouve dans une situation analogue à celle du fer, par suite de certains chocs répétés. Il en est alors des hommes comme du chanvre et du fer : ils sont rouis."

"La solitude, c'est le vide ; et la nature morale en a tout autant d'horreur que la nature physique. La solitude n'est habitable que pour l'homme de génie qui la remplit de ses idées, filles du monde spirituel, ou pour le contemplateur des œuvres divines qui la trouve illuminée par le jour du ciel, animée par le souffle et par la voix de Dieu. Hormis ces deux hommes, si voisins du paradis, la solitude est à la torture ce que le moral est au physique. Entre la solitude et la torture il a toute la différence de la maladie nerveuse à la maladie chirurgicale. C'est la souffrance multipliée par l'infini. Le corps touche à l'infini par le système nerveux, comme l'esprit y pénètre par la pensée."

"Une des obligations auxquelles ne doit jamais manquer un historien des mœurs, c'est de ne point gâter le vrai par des arrangements en apprence dramatiques, surtout quand le vrai a pris la peine de devenir romanesque. La nature sociale, à Paris surtout, comporte de tels hasards, des enchevêtrements de conjectures si capricieuses, que l'imagination des inventeurs est à tout moment dépassée. La hardiesse du vrai s'élève à des combiniasons interdites à l'art, tant elles sont invraisemblables ou peu décentes, à moins que l'écrivain ne les adoucisse, ne les émoude, ne les châtre."

"He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men."

"Man has sufficient cause for tears without adding to them by books."

"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I'm sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn't experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of "If I can do it, I may do it." I won't generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I'd already been defined."

"Balzac's reaction was somewhat different, but in its own way no less flattering. The novelist had become a good friend of both Aurore's and Jules Sandeau's, and they had been amused to see him use the money earned by his La Peau de Chagrin to transform his low-ceilinged apartment on the Rue Cassini into an "assemblage of marquises' boudoirs" — as George Sand later described it — with walls dripping in a feminine exuberance of silk and lace. Once, after entertaining them to a dinner of boiled beef, melons, and champagne (his standard fare), he had insisted on accompanying them home as far as the arrayed in a lovely new dressing gown and with a handsome brass candlestick to light the way, explaining as they went that no robber would dream of attacking him — taking him either for a dangerous madman or a prince whom it would be wiser to respect."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit. He drags us by his magic force through scene after scene of unmitigated vice, till the effect of walking among this human carrion is a moral nausea."

"Novelists and short-story writers provide implicitly a critique of their society. The proof of that is the importance given to Balzac's Human Comedy by critics in the Eastern European countries, critics who stem from the extreme left. Balzac himself was an extremely conservative person politically, very reactionary, but in his Comédie Humaine he gave such a truthful, marvellous picture of that very society of which he was a part, that in the eyes of the leftist critics, socialist critics, he gives an unbeatable picture of what was wrong with the bourgeoisie at that time, of the seeds of its own destruction that were within it. A good writer can't help revealing the truth that is in his society and by that token there is a political implication and he is politically committed."

"Quantity and intensity are at once and together his sign."

"Balzac said 200 years ago that "behind every great fortune lies a crime," but we know how to create wealth now: the Industrial Revolution created wealth, the and our ability to manipulate cyberspace, and to develop concepts and structures in mathematics, and elsewhere. We can create real wealth. So, per se, being wealthy is now not the result of taking from those with less; and yet this historic problem has come roaring back... under the guise of conservatism."

"Stendhal's a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendhal have been rather disastrous. I think you'd do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"You are not, with Balzac, in the Elysian fields; you are sometimes much rather in the Halls of Eblis. But, if you can only apprehend it, there is always Imagination to guide, relieve, console you; and it is the Imagination of a Titan, if not exactly of a God."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead."

"A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility."

"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."

"The Louvre is like the morgue; one goes there to identify one’s friends."

"Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."

"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."

"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity."

"Depuis le jour de ma naissance, ma mort s'est mise en marche. Elle marche à ma rencontre, sans se presser."

"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."

"What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies."

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."

"After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."

"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."

"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."

"The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?"

"What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end."

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."

"Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."

"You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."

"Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs."

"That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist."

"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."

"Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."

"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."

"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."

"The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches."

"Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images."

"The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."

"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."

"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."

"Art is science made clear."

"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."

"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."

"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator."

"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."

"The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness."

"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas ."

"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them."

"We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel."

"Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you."

"Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically."

"Mettez un lieu commun en place, nettoyez-le, frottez-le, éclairez-le de telle sorte qu'il frappe avec sa jeunesse et avec la même fraîcheur, le même jet qu'il avait à sa source, vous ferez œuvre de poète. Tout le reste est littérature."

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo."

"Life is a horizontal fall."

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."

"A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system. … The craving for opium can be endured in a car."

"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."

"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."

"If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.... The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house."

"It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."

"Respect movements, flee schools."

"Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally."

"People would say to Al Brown: "You are not a boxer. You are a dancer." He laughed at this, and won."

"Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection."

"Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind."

"One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet."

"Hasten slowly. Run faster than beauty."

"Find first, seek later."

"Be helpful, even if it compromises you."

"Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail."

"He who is affected by an insult is infected by it."

"Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends."

"Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities."

"Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous."

"See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation."

"Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs."

"Allow the power of the soul to grow as flagrant as the power of sex."

"Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble."

"Hate only hatred."

"Disavow anyone who provokes or accepts the extermination of a race to which he does not belong."

"Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself."

"Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical."

"Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you."

"Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known."

"The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery."

"Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory..."

"Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value."

"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal... unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad."

"Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?"

"Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground."

"Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative. This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie..."

"Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance."

"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."

"Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else — and failing."

"I met a young man of nineteen or twenty, who at that time vibrated with all the youth of the world. This was Jean Cocteau, then a passionately imaginative youth to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City."

"Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante."

"Que les gens d'esprit sont bêtes."

"Aujourd'hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante."

"Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer."

"Médiocre et rampant, et l'on arrive à tout."

"Calomniez, calomniez; il en reste toujours quelque chose."

"Il n'est pas nécessaire de tenir les choses pour en raisonner."

"De toutes les choses sérieuses, le mariage étant la plus bouffonne."

"Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout temps, madame, il n'y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes."

"Parce que vous êtes un grand seigneur, vous vous croyez un grand génie! … vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus. Du reste homme assez ordinaire!"

"Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est point d'éloge flatteur; et qu'il n'y a que les petits hommes qui redoutent les petits écrits."

"Tout finit par des chansons."

"Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empêchera d'être heureux."

"Mourir, ce n'est rien. Commence donc par vivre. C'est moins drôle et c'est plus long."

"On ne peut pleurer pour le monde entier : C'est au-delà des forces humaines. Il faut choisir !"

"When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you're seventy, nearly all of you."

"Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?”"

"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious."

"All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient."

"As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost."

"He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign."

"Thus the Semitic race is to be recognized almost entirely by negative characteristics. It has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in everything there is a complete absence of complexity, subtlety or feeling, except for unity. It has no variety in its monotheism."

"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact."

"Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him."

"To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed."

"Jesus, in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government. That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse."

"Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?"

"La colonisation en grand est une nécessité politique tout à fait de premier ordre. Une nation qui ne colonise pas est irrévocablement vouée au socialisme, à la guerre du riche et du pauvre. La conquête d'un pays de race inférieure par une race supérieure, qui s'y établit pour le gouverner, n'a rien de choquant."

"We aspire not to equality but to domination. Countries inhabited by foreign races must become again countries of serfs, farm laborers, and factory workers. The goal is not to suppress inequities, but, rather, to amplify them and to make of them a matter of course."

"La régénération des races inférieures ou abâtardies par les races supérieures est dans l'ordre providentiel de l'humanité. L'homme du peuple est presque toujours chez nous un noble déclassé ; sa lourde main est bien mieux faite pour manier l'épée que l'outil servile. Plutôt que de travailler, il choisit de se battre, c'est- à-dire qu'il revient à son premier état. ."

"Regere imperio populos, voilà notre vocation."

"La nature a fait une race d'ouvriers ; c'est la race chinoise, d'une dextérité de main merveilleuse sans presque aucun sentiment d'honneur; gouvernez-la avec justice , en prélevant d'elle pour le bienfait d'un tel gouvernement un ample douaire au profit de la race conquérante, elle sera satisfaite ; une race de travailleurs de la terre, c'est le nègre ; soyez pour lui bon et humain, et tout sera dans l'ordre; -- une race de maîtres et de soldats, c'est la race européenne ."

"I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life."

"You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect."

"Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation"

"To write well is to think well; there is no art of style distinct from the culture of the mind. The good writer is a complete mind, gifted with judgment, passion, imagination, and at the same time well trained. The inner qualities of rectitude, of brilliant geniality, are not given; instruction, wealth of information, fulness of knowledge, are acquired. Thus good training of the mind is the only school of good style. Wanting that, you have merely rhetoric and bad taste."

"A Muslim who knows French will never be a dangerous Muslim."

"The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism."

"The true Semitic society is that of the tent and of the tribe."

"Nature, on the other hand, plays a very small role in the Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistic; sublime in its immense uniformity, it primarily revealed to man the idea of 'infinite.'"

"Thus, the Semitic race is recognizable almost solely through negative characteristics: it has neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life; in sum an absence of complexity, of nuance, an exclusive sentiment of unity."

"No place in the world has had a comparable role to that of the nameless mountain or valley where mankind first attained self-consciousness. Let us be proud ... of the old patriarchs who, at the foot of Imaiis, laid the foundations of what we are and of what we shall become."

"A famous student of history has bequeathed to us a definition of nationality which is worth attention: I refer to Ernest Renan, of whom George Meredith once said to me, while the great French critic was still living, that there was more in his head than in any other head in Europe. Renan tells us that "Man is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.""

"There has always been an element of the magical in the style of M. Ernest Renan—an art of saying things in a way to make them beautiful."

"Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre. ... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle."

"There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people."

"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."

"Are you descendants of Goethe or of Attila the Hun?"

"What I especially love in Lefebvre is this intimate alliance — which for me makes the true man — of pessimism of the intelligence, which penetrates every illusion, and optimism of the will."

"In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe...Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"Religious faith in the case of Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws; moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but they are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own ways."

"A hundred facts testify to how great an extent the East was mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of our era."

"If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India. ... For more than 30 centuries, the tree of vision, with all its thousand branches and their millions of twigs, has sprung from this torrid land, the burning womb of the Gods. It renews itself tirelessly showing no signs of decay."

"Let us return to our eagle's nest in the Himalayas. It is waiting for us, for it is ours, eaglets of Europe, we need not renounce any part of our real nature...whence we formerly took our flight."

"Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic belief."

"The true Vedantic spirit does not start out with a system of preconceived ideas. It possesses absolute liberty and unrivalled courage among religions with regard to the facts to be observed and the diverse hypotheses it has laid down for their coordination. Never having been hampered by a priestly order, each man has been entirely free to search wherever he pleased for the spiritual explanation of the spectacle of the universe."

"The greatest human ideal is the great cause of bringing together the thoughts of Europe and Asia; the great soul of India will topple our world."

"The vast and tranquil metaphysics of India is unfolded; her conception of the universe, her social organization, perfect in its day and still capable of adaptation to the demands of modern times; the solution which she offers for the feminist problem, for the problems of the family, of love, of marriage; and lastly, the magnificent revelation of her art. The whole vast soul of India proclaims from end to end of its crowded and well ordered edifice the same domination of a sovereign synthesis." There is no negation. All is harmonized. All the forces of life are grouped like a forest, whose thousand waving arms are led by Nataraja, the master of the Dance. Everything has its place, every being has its function, and all take part in the divine concert, their different voices, and their very dissonances, creating, in the phrase of Heraclitus, a most beautiful harmony. Whereas in the West, cold, hard logic isolates the unusual, shutting it off from the rest of life into a definite and distinct compartment of the spirit. India, ever mindful of the natural differences in souls and in philosophies, endeavors to blend them into each other, so as to recreate in its fullest perfection the complete unity. The matching of opposites produces the true rhythm of life."

"Of course, this entire fabric of Indian life stands solidly on faith, that is to say, on a slender and emotional hypothesis. But amid all the beliefs of Europe, and of Asia, that of the Indian Brahmins seems to me infinitely the most alluring. And the reason why I love the Brahmin more than the other schools of Asiatic thought is because it seems to me to contain them all. Greater than all European philosophies, it is even capable of adjusting itself to the vast hypotheses of modern science. Our Christian religions have tried in vain, when there were no other choice open to them, to adapt themselves to the progress of science. But after having allowed myself to be swept away by the powerful rhythm of Brahmin thought, along the curve of life, with its movement of alternating ascent and return, I come back to my own century, and while finding therein the immense projections of a new cosmogony, offspring of the genius of Einstein, or deriving freely from the discoveries, I yet do not feel that I enter a strange land. I yet can hear resounding still the cosmic symphony of all those planets which forever succeed each other, are extinguished and once more illumined, with their living souls, their humanities, their gods – according to the laws of the eternal To Become, the Brahmin Samsara – I hear Siva dancing, dancing in the heart of the world, in my own heart."

"In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center."

"Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!"

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. ... Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. ... [E]ven Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a happy memory to the end of my days."

"Goethe and Romain Rolland paint psychological landscapes, depicting both characters and spiritual conditions, but the Japanese-Flaubertian analytical tanka is a form alien to them."

"Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."

"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."

"The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish."

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace."

"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil."

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."

"Optimism is the opium of the people."

"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."

"Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým."

"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."

"It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life."

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten."

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!" The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"The first step in liquidating a people," said Hubl, "is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."

"...[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, [...] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted."

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia."

"In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body."

"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?"

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

"To love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."

"He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them."

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

"Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."

"When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it."

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?"

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us."

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress."

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate."

"It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting."

"Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition — the same motif appears at the beginning and the end — may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. … But it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo."

"No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself."

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."

""Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. "Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."

"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."

"The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."

"What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful."

"Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."

"Love is our freedom."

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."

"Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

"Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch."

"Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”"

"We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."

"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it."

"What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March."

"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

"Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."

"I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare."

"This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared."

"It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go."

"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?"

"You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."

"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."

"Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time."

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together."

"No love can survive muteness."

"Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable."

"He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her."

"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."

"Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."

"She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place.""

"(For Milan Kundera, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". Are we losing this battle?) NG: One of the most truthful and profound insights ever made."

"Kundera sees writers and artists as vital witnesses of the twentieth century as an age marked by tyranny, saying: 'People regard those days as an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books and legalised murder. But we who remember must bear witness; it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.'"

"To remember, if my Latin is correct, actually means to put the parts together. So that implies there are ways of losing parts. Kundera talks about this aspect of storytelling, too. In fact, he says that history, which is another kind of story, is often deliberately falsified in order to make a people forget who they are or who they were. He calls that "the method of organizing forgetting.""

"I particularly like the works of Milan Kundera such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His observations on human nature are more penetrating than those of Solzhenitsyn."

"He writes about his prick too much. Excuse me, boys. (What do you mean by that?) I happen to like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting very much. But this last book (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), it's really, it's as though he's been consumed by Western concerns. I think it's a corrupt book, I really do. I mean I really read it with great hopes because I really liked Laughter and Forgetting, I thought it was great. But I'm so disgusted. I mean who the fuck does he think he is? It's not that I don't think that a person can write about sexual obsession. I think there's not much more interesting than that in a way. I'm all for it. But it's so egocentrical and false, admiring her so much for this idiotic loyalty. (At the same time he's trying to use sex as a political metaphor.) Yeah, but so obviously. But I still like the other book."

"La raison et l'amour sont ennemis jurés."

"Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses."

"Qui se laisse outrager, mérite qu'on l'outrage Et l'audace impunie enfle trop un courage."

"Un service au-dessus de toute récompense À force d'obliger tient presque lieu d'offense."

"Ses rides, sur son front, ont grave ses exploits."

"L'amour est un tyran qui n'épargne personne."

"Pour grands que soient les rois, ils sont ce que nous sommes: Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes."

"Don Diègue: Rodrigue, as-tu du coeur? Don Rodrigue: Tout autre que mon père L’éprouverait sur l’heure."

"Qui peut vivre infâme est indigne du jour."

"Qui ne craint point la mort ne craint point les menaces."

"L’on peut me réduire à vivre sans bonheur, Mais non pas me résoudre à vivre sans honneur."

"Je suis jeune, il est vrai; mais aux âmes bien nées La valeur n’attend point le nombre des années."

"À qui venge son père, il n’est rien d’impossible."

"À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire."

"Les hommes valeureux le sont du premier coup."

"La moitié de ma vie a mis l’autre au tombeau."

"Jamais nous ne goûtons de parfaite allégresse: Nos plus heureux succès sont mêlés de tristesse."

"Ô combien d’actions, combien d’exploits célèbres Sont demeurés sans gloire au milieu des ténèbres."

"Et le combat cessa faute de combattants."

"Faites votre devoir, et laissez faire aux dieux."

"Tous maux sont pareils alors qu’ils sont extrêmes."

"De pareils serviteurs sont les forces des rois, Et de pareils aussi sont au-dessus des lois."

"Ta vertu met ta gloire au-dessus de ton crime."

"L'ambition déplaît quand elle est assouvie... Monté sur le faîte, il aspire à descendre."

"L'exemple souvent n'est qu'un miroir trompeur; Et l'ordre du destin qui gêne nos pensées N'est pas toujours écrit dans les choses passées."

"Peu de généreux vont jusqu'à dédaigner, Après un sceptre acquis, la douceur de régner."

"Le pire des États, c'est l'État populaire."

"La perfidie est noble envers la tyrannie."

"Qui peut tout doit tout craindre."

"Qui pardonne aisément invite à l'offenser."

"La clémence est la plus belle marque Qui fasse à l'univers connaître un vrai monarque."

"Tous ces crimes d'État qu'on fait pour la couronne, Le ciel nous en absout alors qu'il nous la donne."

"Le désir s'accroît quand l'effet se recule."

"Fuyez un ennemi qui sait votre défaut."

"À raconter ses maux souvent on les soulage."

"Sa fureur ne va qu'à briser nos autels, Elle n'en veut qu'aux dieux, et non pas aux mortels."

"Ma raison, il est vrai, dompte mes sentiments, Mais, quelque autorité que sur eux elle ait prise, Elle n'y règne pas, elle les tyrannise."

"Je consens, ou plutôt j'aspire à ma ruine."

"Je vous aime, Beaucoup moins que mon Dieu, mais bien plus que moi-même."

"Plus l'effort est grand, plus la gloire en est grande."

"Les chrétiens n'ont qu'un Dieu, maître absolu de tout, De qui le seul vouloir fait tout ce qu'il résout; Mais, si j'ose entre nous dire ce que me semble, Les nôtres bien souvent s'accordent mal ensemble, Et, me dût leur colère écraser à tes yeux, Nous en avons beaucoup pour être de vrais dieux."

"Sans doute vos chrétiens, qu'on persécute en vain, Ont quelque chose en eux qui surpasse l'humain: Ils mènent une vie avec tant d'innocence, Que le ciel leur en doit quelque reconnaissance; Se relever plus forts, plus ils sont abattus, N'est pas aussi l'effet des communes vertus."

"À force d'être juste on est souvent coupable."

"Qui punit le vaincu ne craint point le vainqueur."

"Ne durât-il qu'un jour, ma gloire est sans seconde D'être du moins un jour la maîtresse du monde."

"Ma mort était ma gloire, et le destin m'en prive."

"C'est une imprudence assez commune aux rois D'écouter trop d'avis et se tromper au choix."

"Comme nos intérêts, nos sentiments diffèrent."

"La façon de donner vaut mieux que ce qu'on donne."

"Un menteur est toujours prodigue de serments."

"Les gens que vous tuez se portent assez bien."

"Il faut bonne mémoire après qu'on a menti."

"Faithless we l'on vouch Craig, et je ne drain rain."

"Le Roi, juste et prudent, ne veut Que ce qu'il peut."

"Et ne savez-vous plus qu'il n'est princes ni rois Qu'elle daigne égaler à ses moindres bourgeois?"

"Seigneur, si j'ai raison, qu'importe à qui je sois?"

"Il m'a trop bien servi; Augmentant mon pouvoir, il me l'a tout ravi: II n'est plus mon sujet qu'autant qu'il le veut être. Et qui me fait régner en effet est mon maître."

"C'est un crime d'État que d'en pouvoir commettre."

"Je ne veux point de rois qui sachent obéir."

"Qui fait le conseiller n'est plus ambassadeur."

"Ma générosité cède enfin à sa haine."

"C'est n'avoir pas perdu tout votre temps à Rome, Que vous savoir ainsi défendre en galant homme: Vous avez de l'esprit, si vous n'avez du cœur."

"Un véritable roi n'est ni mari ni père; Il regarde son trône, et rien de plus."

"On a peine à haïr ce qu'on a bien aimé, Et le feu mal éteint est bientôt rallumé."

"Rome seule aujourd'hui peut résister à Rome."

"Ils etaient plus que rois; ils sont moindres qu'esclaves."

"Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute où je suis."

"L'amour-propre est la source en nous de tous les autres."

"Qui se vainc une fois peut se vaincre toujours."

"Me puis-je mieux venger, si vous me trahissez, Que d'aimer à vos yeux ce que vous haïssez?"

"Un monarque a souvent des lois à s'imposer; Et qui veut pouvoir tout ne doit pas tout oser."

"Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort."

"As all the perfumes of the vanished day Rise from the earth still moistened with the dew So from my chastened soul beneath thy ray Old love is born anew."

"Great artists have no country."

"Je ne puis;&mdash;malgré moi l'infini me tourmente."

"The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near."

"For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth, Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs! O his Nuits! His Rolla, Namouna, La Coupe. It’s all so French, which is to say unbearable to the nth degree; French, but not Parisian. Another work by that odious genius who inspired Rabelais, Voltaire and Jean La Fontaine, with notes by M. Taine! How vernal, Musset’s mind! And how delightful, his love! Like paint on enamel, his dense poetry! We will savor French poetry endlessly, in France. Every grocer’s son can reel off something Rollaesque, every seminarian has five hundred rhymes hidden in his notebook. At fifteen, these passionate impulses give boys boners; at sixteen, they’ve already resolved to recite their lines with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who can write a Rolla, does—and they all do! Some may even still die from it. Musset couldn’t do anything: there were visions behind the gauze curtains: he closed his eyes. French, half-dead, dragged from tavern to schooldesk, the beautiful corpse has died, and, ever since, we needn’t waste our time trying to rouse him with our abominations!"

"Je l'ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!"

"Derrière un voile, invisible et présente, J'étais de ce grand corps l'âme toute-puissante."

"Ce que je sais le mieux, c'est mon commencement."

"Vous êtes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!"

"Mon unique espérance est dans mon désespoir."

"Jamais on ne vaincra les Romains que dans Rome."

"Un bienfait reproché tient toujours lieu d’offense."

"Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire."

"Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée,Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée."

"C'est toi qui l'as nommé."

"Ce n'est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée: C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée."

"L'innocence enfin n'a rien à redouter."

"Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses dégrés; Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence Passer subitement à l'extrême licence."

"Pour réparer des ans l'irréparable outrage."

"Aux petits des oiseaux il donne leur pâture, Et sa bonté s’étend sur toute la nature."

"Hâtons-nous aujourd'hui de jouir de la vie. Qui sait si nous serons demain?"

"Dieu des Juifs, tu l'emportes!"

"A good doctor pursues his calling without any regard to a bad result. Otherwise, teaching in medical school might be called into question and where would we be then?"

"To forbid wine to a man of your type is the same as forbidding women to a man of a different sort."

"In order to know the worth of a virtuous husband, is it not necessary for the wife to be dispirited herself? First, give her a young man of twenty, and not only will she be fine, she'll have a reasonable husband."

"A smart daughter ought not to examine her future husband too closely. She ought to consider it a pleasure to find one agreeable to her father."

"I don't know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do."

"The more I have to suffer, the more my character will grow."

"It may be said that his wit shines at the expense of his memory."

"A flatterer can risk everything with great personages."

"Pride and conceit were the original sin of man."

"I wish you all sorts of prosperity with a little more taste."

"The pleasure of talking is the inextinguishable passion of a woman, coeval with the act of breathing."

"Isocrates was in the right to insinuate, in his elegant Greek expression, that what is got over the Devil's back is spent under his belly."

"Facts are stubborn things."

"Plain as a pike-staff."

"I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon." My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world."

"I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared. I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world."

"I established myself in a fairly remote country house and entertained my imagination with various means of transport. Here is how I betook myself to heaven. I attached to myself a number of bottles of dew, and the heat of the sun, which attracted it, drew me so high that I finally emerged above the highest clouds. But the sun's attraction of the dew drew me upwards so rapidly that instead of approaching the Moon, as I intended, I seemed to be farther from it than when I started. I broke open some of the bottles and felt my weight overcome the attraction and bring me back towards the earth."

"With my equipment, I walked toward a thatched cottage from which I saw smoke emerging. I was scarcely within pistol-shot range when I was surrounded by a large number of savages. They were very surprised to meet me, because I think I was the first they had seen dressed in bottles. And, to confound even more all the interpretations they might have given to this attire, I walked almost without touching the ground. They could not know that any jostling of my body raised me off the ground because the dew was heated by the noonday sun and that more bottles of dew might have taken me upwards into the air."

"I was presented to Monsieur de Montmagny, the viceroy. He asked my nationality, name, and rank. When I had satisfied him by recounting the success of my voyage, which he either believed or pretended to, he kindly lent me a room in his apartment. I was happy to meet a man capable of enlightened opinions, one who was not surprised when I told him that the earth must have turned beneath me while I was aloft. Having begun my ascent two leagues from Paris, I had come down in almost a straight line to Canada."

"In the evening, as I was going to bed, I saw him come into my room. "I would not have come," he told me, "and interrupt your rest unless I believed that someone who could travel nine hundred leagues in half a day could have done so without getting tired. You don't know of the fine argument I've been having about you with our Jesuit priests?" he added. "They insist you are a magician. The best you can hope for from them is to pass only for an impostor.""

"Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages. I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street.""

"As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits. Suppose the universe were not infinite: God himself would be finite, because he could not be where there is nothing, and he could not increase the size of the universe without adding to his own size and come to be where he had not been before."

"After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon."

"I constructed a machine that I imagined was capable of taking me as high as I wanted to go. I launched myself into the air from the edge of a cliff. But I had miscalculated, and I crashed into the valley below. I returned to my room, quite rumpled but not discouraged. I took some beef marrow and slathered it all over my body, which was bruised from head to toe. I fortified my courage with a bottle of cordial and went back for my machine."

"I ran and grabbed the arm of the soldier who was lighting the fire. I tore the fuse away from him and, furious, threw myself into my machine to break down the contraption surrounding it. But I was too late. Hardly had I stepped inside when I found myself propelled into the clouds. I was terrified, but my mind was not too upset for me to remember all that happened at that moment. I can tell you, then, that the fire burned out a bank of rockets (which had been linked together in rows of six with a hook at the edge of each set of half-dozen). Another stage ignited, then another, so that the danger in the gunpowder was left behind as it burned. When the material was used up, the scaffolding was gone. I was thinking that all I had left to do was ram my head against some mountain when I felt (without moving in the slightest) that I was still going up. My machine separated from me, and I saw it fall back to earth."

"After falling for a very long time, as I surmise after the fact (I was falling so fast that I must have lost track), all I can remember is that I found myself under a tree. I was entangled in three or four rather large branches I had broken in my fall. An apple had squashed against my face and made it all wet with its juice. Fortunately, as you will soon learn, this place was the Garden of Eden, and the tree I had fallen into was none other than the Tree of Life. You would be quite right to think I would have been killed a thousand times over but for this miraculous good fortune."

"The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge. As soon as I had tasted its fruit, my mind would be enlightened with all the truths a person could know. That is the voyage for which I built my chariot. Finally, I climbed aboard and, when I was securely settled on the seat, I tossed the magnetic ball high into the air. The chariot I had built was more massive in the middle than at the ends; it was perfectly balanced because the middle rose faster than the extremities. When I had risen to the point that the magnet was drawing me to, I seized the magnetic ball and tossed it into the air again."

"To tell the truth, the chariot was an astonishing sight to behold, because I had polished the steel of my flying house so carefully that it reflected the sunlight on all sides. It was so bright and dazzling that I thought, myself, that I had been carried away in a chariot of fire."

"The apple of knowledge is not far from here. As soon as you've eaten it, you'll know as much as I do. But be careful not to make any mistakes: most of the apples hanging from that tree are enveloped in a thick skin. If you taste it, you will be brought low, beneath man; the inner part of the fruit will bring you up to the level of an angel."

"You are now bearing the punishment for the shortcomings of your world. Here, as in your world, there are benighted people who cannot tolerate thinking about things they are not accustomed to. But you realize that you are being treated here the same as there. If someone from this world came to yours with the audacity to call himself a man, your learned men would stifle him for being a monster or a monkey possessed by the Devil."

"The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts."

"I am not from your world or this one; I was born on the Sun. Sometimes our world becomes overcrowded because our people live so long. Our people are almost free of wars and illness, and sometimes our government officials send colonies to neighboring worlds."

"To make myself visible as I am now, when I sense that the cadaver that I occupy is almost worn out or that the organs are no longer working very well, I breathe myself into a young body that has just died."

"Even though they, themselves, were material beings, they could show themselves to us only by taking on bodies that our senses were able to perceive."

"You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand. For example, I perceive by my senses what makes a magnet point north, what makes tides rise and fall, and what becomes of an animal after death. Your people are not proportioned to perceive such miracles, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colors of a painting or the shadings of an iris. He will imagine them as something palpable, edible, audible or olfactory. Likewise, if I were to explain to you what I perceive by the senses you do not have, you would interpret it as something that could be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted; but it is not like that."

"I felt the body I was occupying so weakened that all its organs were shutting down. I asked the way to the hospital, and as soon as I walked in I discovered the body of a young man who had just given up the ghost. I approached the body and pretended I had seen it move. I protested to all the attendants that he wasn't dead and that his illness wasn't even dangerous. Nobody noticed when I adroitly breathed myself into him. My old body immediately dropped dead, and I stood up in this fresh body. Everyone exclaimed that it was a miracle, and I didn't stop to disabuse them."

"Our host received a piece of paper from my familiar spirit. I asked if he were giving him a check or note to pay the bill. He answered no, that he had settled the account with a poem. "What? A poem?" I asked. "Are innkeepers curious about rhymes?" "It's the local currency," he answered. "The sextain I've just given him will cover our expenses. I wasn't afraid of coming up short. Even if we'd spent a week in luxury, it wouldn't have cost a sonnet, and I have four on me. Along with two epigrams, two odes and an eclogue.""

"One day, my male companion (they took me for the female) told me what had really caused him to wander about the world and finally to leave it for the Moon. He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free."

"How do you think a spade, sword or dagger wounds us? Because the metal is a form of matter in which the particles are closer and more tightly bound together than those of your flesh. The metal forces flesh to yield to strength, just as a galloping squadron penetrates a battle line that is of much greater extent. And why is a piece of hot metal hotter than a piece of burning wood? Because the metal contains more heat in a smaller volume. The particles in the metal are more compact than those in the wood."

"Do you say it is incomprehensible that there is nothingness in the world and that we are partly composed of nothing? Well, why not? Is not the whole world enveloped by nothingness? Since you concede that point, admit as well that it is just as easy for the world to have nothingness within as without."

"A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it."

"The town was abuzz with talk of the King's animals. We were fed regularly, and the King and Queen quite often enjoyed feeling my abdomen to see if I weren't pregnant; they were extraordinarily eager to have a whole family of little animals like us."

"I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little. Immediately the news spread throughout the kingdom that two little wild men had been discovered. We were smaller than everybody else because the wilderness had provided us with such bad food. And it was a genetic defect that caused us to have forelimbs that weren't strong enough to support us. This belief gained strength through repetition despite the priests of the country. They opposed it, saying that it was an awful impiety to believe that not only animals but monsters might be of the same species as they."

"People were soon talking only of my bons mots, and they esteemed my wit so highly that the clergy was forced to publish a decree that forbade anyone to believe I was capable of reason, and it expressly commanded everyone of all ranks to believe — no matter how intelligently I might act — that I was guided by instinct."

"Even if a king defeats his enemy in battle, that still doesn't settle anything. There are other, less numerous armies of philosophers and scientists, and their contests determine the true triumph or defeat of nations. One scholar is matched with another; one creative mind with another; and one judicious temperament with his counterpart. A victory won on that field counts for three won by force of arms."

"I could scarcely keep from laughing at this scrupulous manner of waging war. I cited the European example as a much more forceful policy. A monarch is careful not to overlook any advantage for victory. She had some questions about that: "Tell me," she said, "do your princes have no other pretext for war than might makes right?" "Yes," I answered, "the justice of their cause." "Why, then," she continued, "do they not choose to be reconciled by impartial judges? And if it is determined that both sides are in the right, then why not maintain the status quo? Or why not play a game of gin rummy for the town or province they're arguing over? But no, while they cause the death of four million men who are better than they, they stay in their strategy rooms making light of the way the poor fellows are being massacred. But I'm wrong to criticize the valour of your brave men. It's important to die for one's country when it means being the subject of a king who wears a ruffled collar or a pleated one.""

"You praise a man for having killed his enemy by means of an advantage; and by praising him for boldness you praise him for a sin against nature, because boldness leads to destruction."

"The King's daughter didn't talk to me any more about military matters at the time, because she was afraid of being discovered alone with me early in the morning. The reason was not that immodesty is a crime in that country. On the contrary, any man — except for convicted felons — can ask what he wants of any woman, and any woman can bring suit against a man who refuses her. But the King's daughter didn't dare come to see me publicly because she said the priests had preached at the last sacrifice that women were mainly the ones who were saying I was a man. The priests claimed that women were disguising their execrable desire to mingle with animals and shamelessly commit sins against nature with me. That was why I went a long time without seeing her or any other female."

"The priests had been told that I had dared to say that the moon was the world I came from and that their world was only a moon. They believed that constituted an adequately just pretext to condemn me to drowning, which was their way of exterminating atheists."

"The great pontiff took the floor to argue the case against me. I don't remember his harangue, because I was too horrified to understand such a discordant voice, and because he made his speech with a musical instrument so loud it deafened me. He had deliberately chosen a trumpet. The violence of its martial tone was supposed to make the people call for my death and to keep them from thinking rationally, as happens in our armies, where the din of trumpets and drums prevents the soldier from thinking about the importance of his life."

"O just ones, hear me! You cannot condemn this man, monkey or parrot for saying that the moon is the world he comes from. If he is a man, all men are free. Is he then not free to imagine what he wants, even if he does not come from the moon? Can you force him to have only your visions? Impossible! You may make him say that he believes that the moon is not a world, but still he will not believe it. To believe something, one must imagine that it is more probable than not. Unless you show him what is probable or he realizes it himself, he may tell you that he believes and yet he will not believe."

"A present loses its value when it is given without the choice of the person who receives it. Caesar was given death, and so was Cassius. However, Cassius was indebted to the slave who gave it to him, while Caesar owed nothing to his murderers, because they forced him to take it."

"According to your religion, is any part of the body more sacred or unholy than another? Why will I commit a sin if I touch myself on the part in the middle and not when I touch my ear or heel? Because it tickles? Then I should not defecate into a pot, because that can't be done without some sort of sensual pleasure. Nor should mystics elevate themselves to the contemplation of God, because they enjoy a great pleasure of imagination. I am indeed astounded at how much the religion of your country is against nature and is jealous of all the pleasures of men. I am surprised that your priests haven't made it a crime to scratch oneself, because one feels a pleasurable pain. And yet I have noticed that far-seeing Nature has made all great, brave and intelligent people favor the delicacies of love: witness Samson, David, Hercules, Caesar, Hannibal and Charlemagne. Did Nature do so in order that they might harvest the organ of that pleasure with a sickle? Alas, Nature even went under a washtub to debauch Diogenes, who was thin, ugly and flea-bitten, and make him compose sighs to Lais with the breath he blew upon carrots. No doubt Nature did so because it was concerned lest there be a shortage of honorable people in the world."

"Tell me, is the cabbage you mention not as much a creature of God as you? Do you not both have God and potentiality for your father and mother? For all eternity has God not occupied His intellect with the cabbage's birth as well as yours? It also seems that He has necessarily provided more for the birth of the vegetable than for the thinking being... Will anyone say that we are born in the image of the Sovereign Being, while cabbages are not? Even if it were true, we have effaced that resemblance by soiling our soul in the way in which we resembled Him, because there is nothing more contrary to God than sin. If our soul, then, is no longer His image, we still do not resemble Him by our hands, feet, mouth, face and ears any more than the cabbage does by its leaves, flowers, stem, heart or head."

"I signaled to my host to try to have the philosophers expound on some aspect of their knowledge. As a good friend he immediately rose to the occasion. I won't go into the conversation that accompanied his request, and the difference between the comic and the serious was too slight to translate."

"I will prove that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world. Imagine the universe as a great animal, and the stars as worlds like other animals inside it. These stars serve in turn as worlds for other organisms, such as ourselves, horses and elephants. We in our turn are worlds for even smaller organisms such as cankers, lice, worms and mites. And they are earths for other, imperceptible beings. Just as we appear to be a huge world to these little organisms, perhaps our flesh, blood and bodily fluids are nothing more than a connected tissue of little animals that move and cause us to move. Even as they let themselves be led blindly by our will, which serves them as a vehicle, they animate us and combine to produce this action we call life."

"You will say, 'How can chance assemble in one place all the things necessary to produce an oak tree?' My answer is that it would be no miracle if the matter thus arranged had not formed an oak. But it would have been a very great miracle if, once the matter was thus arranged, an oak had not been formed. A few less of some shapes, and it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder, heather or moss. A little more of some other shapes and it might have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in its shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, an ape or a man."

"You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being? No wonder, then, that an infinite amount of incessantly moving and changing matter makes up the few animals, vegetables and minerals that we see. No wonder, either, that if you throw dice a hundred times, they will all show the same numbers at some point. This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made."

"Give thought to life and liberty."

"When I opened a box, I found inside something made of metal, somewhat like our clocks, full of an endless number of little springs and tiny machines. It was indeed a book, but it was a miraculous one that had no pages or printed letters. It was a book to be read not with eyes but with ears. When anyone wants to read, he winds up the machine with a large number of keys of all kinds. Then he turns the indicator to the chapter he wants to listen to. As though from the mouth of a person or a musical instrument come all the distinct and different sounds that the upper-class Moon-beings use in their language. When I thought about this marvelous way of making books, I was no longer surprised that the young people of that country know more at the age of sixteen or eighteen than the greybeards of our world. They can read as soon as they can talk and are never at a loss for reading material. In their rooms, on walks, in town, during voyages, on foot or on horseback, they can have thirty books in their pockets or hanging on the pommels of their saddles. They need only wind a spring to hear one or more chapters or a whole book, if they wish. Thus you always have with you all the great men, both living and dead, who speak to you in their own voices."

"We have observed for thirty centuries that a large nose is a sign on the door of our face that says 'Herein dwells a man who is intelligent, prudent, courteous, affable, noble-minded and generous'. A small nose is a cork on the bottle of the opposite vices."

"I spoke to my young host: "If you would, tell me the meaning of the bronze figure in the shape of shameful parts hanging from the man's belt. I had seen a number of them at court when I was living in a cage, but as I was almost always in the company of the Queen's daughters, I was afraid I might show disrespect to the women and their social status if I brought up such a gross subject of conversation in their presence. "Here, neither females nor males are so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of what has given them being; and virgins are not ashamed to like to see us wear the only thing that goes by that name, as a token of mother nature. "The sash that honors that man carries a medallion in the form of a virile member. It is the sign of a nobleman and distinguishes the noble from the commoner." I admit that this paradox seemed so outlandish that I could not keep from laughing at it. "This custom seems quite extraordinary to me," I said to my young host, "because in our world the mark of nobility is to wear a sword." He replied calmly, "O little man, how insane the nobles of your world must be if they pride themselves on a tool used by executioners, one that is made only to destroy and that is, in the end, the sworn enemy of all that lives. And they hide, on the contrary, a part of the body without which we would not exist, one that is the Prometheus of every animal and tirelessly repairs the weaknesses of nature! How unfortunate a country is where the marks of generation are ignominious and those of annihilation are honorable! And you call that member one of the 'shameful parts', as though anything were more glorious than to give life and anything more infamous than to take it away.""

"All that has sensation and growth — all matter, in short — will pass through man. When that has happened, the great Day of Judgment will come, and that is the end point of the mysteries in the philosophy of the prophets."

"The most competent physician of our world advises the patient to listen to an ignorant doctor who the patient thinks is very competent rather than to a competent doctor who the patient thinks is ignorant. He reason is that our imagination works for our good health, and as long as it is supplemented by remedies, it is capable of healing us. But the most powerful remedies are too weak when the imagination does not apply them."

""I ask you only why you find the belief inconvenient. I'm quite sure you can find no reason. Since it can only be useful, why do you not let yourself be persuaded? If God exists and you don't believe in Him, you will have made a mistake and disobeyed the commandment to believe in Him. If there is no God, you won't be any better off than the rest of us." "Oh yes I will be better off than you," he answered, "because if there is no God, the game is tied. But, on the contrary, if there is one, I can't have offended something I thought did not exist. Sin requires knowing or willing. Don't you see? Even the least wise would not take offense if some uncouth man insulted him as long as the man hadn't intended to, or had mistaken him for someone else, or wine had loosened his tongue. All the more reason then to ask: will God, who is all-imperturbable, get mad at us for not having recognized Him when He, himself, has denied us the means of knowing Him? "But by all you believe, my little animal, if belief in God were so necessary and were of eternal importance to us, would God himself not infuse in everyone enlightenment as bright as the Sun, which hides from no one? Do we pretend that God wants to play hide-and-seek with us, like children calling 'Peekaboo, I see you!'? Does God put on a mask and then take it off? Does He disguise himself to some and reveal himself to others? That would be a God who is either silly or malicious."

"His ridiculous and diabolical opinions made me shudder. I began to look a little more closely at this person and was amazed to see something frightening in his face that I had not noticed before: his eyes were small and sunken, his skin dark, his mouth big, his chin hairy and his nails black. Oh God, I thought immediately, this miserable creature is condemned already and may even be the Antichrist that people talk about so much in our world."

"I marveled repeatedly at the providence of God, who had put these naturally impious people in a place where they could not corrupt his beloved ones and had punished them for their pride by leaving them to their own devices. That is why I don't doubt He has put off having the Gospel preached to them: He knows they would abuse it, and their resistance to it would only earn them a harsher punishment in the other world."

"Cyrano distills the most radical ideas of his time into a potent literary liqueur."

"Voltaire's philosophical tale "Micromégas" is also considered a "classic of early science fiction." It's very well known and easily accessible, and it's easy to read in the original. But in comparison to Cyrano's novel, it is tame."

"I suspect that the playwright Edmond Rostand accurately portrays his ability as a swordsman; Cyrano was something of a legend in his own time."

"To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero."

"Valvert: Your … your nose is … errr … Your nose … is very large! Cyrano: [gravely] Very. Valvert: [laughs] Ha! Cyrano: [imperturbable] Is that all? Valvert: But … Cyrano: Ah, no, young man, that is not enough! You might have said, dear me, there are a thousand things … varying the tone … For instance … Here you are: — Aggressive: "I, monsieur, if I had such a nose, nothing would serve but I must cut it off!" Amicable: "It must be in your way while drinking; you ought to have a special beaker made!" Descriptive: "It is a crag! … a peak! … a promontory! … A promontory, did I say? … It is a peninsula!" Inquisitive: "What may the office be of that oblong receptacle? Is it an inkhorn or a scissor-case?" Mincing: "Do you so dote on birds, you have, fond as a father, been at pains to fit the little darlings with a roost?" Blunt: "Tell me, monsieur, you, when you smoke, is it possible you blow the vapor through your nose without a neighbor crying "The chimney is afire!"?" Anxious: "Go with caution, I beseech, lest your head, dragged over by that weight, should drag you over!" Tender: "Have a little sun-shade made for it! It might get freckled!" Learned: "None but the beast, monsieur, mentioned by Aristophanes, the hippocampelephantocamelos, can have borne beneath his forehead so much cartilage and bone!" Off-Hand: "What, comrade, is that sort of peg in style? Capital to hang one's hat upon!" Emphatic: No wind can hope, O lordly nose, to give the whole of you a cold, but the Nor-Wester!" Dramatic: "It is the Red Sea when it bleeds!" Admiring: "What a sign for a perfumer's shop!" Lyric: "Art thou a Triton, and is that thy conch?" Simple: "A monument! When is admission free?" Deferent: "Suffer, monsieur, that I should pay you my respects: That is what I call possessing a house of your own!" Rustic: "Hi, boys! Call that a nose? You don't gull me! It's either a prize parrot or a stunted gourd!" Military: "Level against the cavalry!" Practical: "Will you put up for raffle? Indubitably, sir, it will be the feature of the game!" And finally in parody of weeping Pyramus: "Behold, behold the nose that traitorously destroyed the beauty of its master! and is blushing for the same!" — That, my dear sir, or something not unlike, is what you could have said to me, had you the smallest leaven of letters or wit; but of wit, O most pitiable of objects made by God, you never had a rudiment, and of letters, you have just those that are needed to spell "fool!" — But, had it been otherwise, and had you been possessed of the fertile fancy requisite to shower upon me, here, in this noble company, that volley of sprightly pleasentries, still should you not have delivered yourself of so much as a quarter of the tenth part of the beginning of the first … For I let off these good things at myself, and with sufficient zest, but do not suffer another to let them off at me!""

"Valvert: Villain, clod-poll, flat-foot, refuse of the earth! Cyrano: [taking off his hat and bowing as if the Vicomte had been introducing himself] Ah? … And mine, Cyrano-Savinien-Hercule of Bergerac! Valvert: [exasperated] Buffoon! Cyrano: [giving a sudden cry, as if seized with a cramp] Aï! … Valvert: [who had started toward the back, turning] What is he saying now? Cyrano: [screwing his face as if in pain] It must have leave to stir … it has a cramp! It is bad for it to be kept still so long! Valvert: What is the matter? Cyrano: My rapier prickles like a foot asleep! Valvert: [drawing] So be it! Cyrano: I shall give you a charming little hurt! Valvert: [contemptous] Poet! Cyrano: Yes, a poet, … and, to such an extent, that while we fence, I will, hop!, extempore, compose you a ballade! Valvert: A ballade? Cyrano: I fear you do not know what that is. Valvert: But … Cyrano: [as if saying a lesson] The ballade is composed of three stanzas of eight lines each … Valvert: [stamps with his feet] Oh! Cyrano: [continuing] And an envoi of four. Valvert: You … Cyrano: I will with the same breath fight you and compose one. And, at the last line, I will hit you. Valvert: Indeed you will not! Cyrano: No? … [Declaiming] Ballade of the duel which in Burgundy house Monsieur de Bergerac fought with a jackanape … Valvert: And what is that, if you please? Cyrano: That is the title. [ … ] Cyrano: [closing his eyes a second] Wait. I am settling upon the rhymes. There. I have them. [in declaiming, he suits the action to the word] Of my broad felt made lighter, I cast my mantle broad, And stand, poet and fighter, To do and to record. I bow, I draw my sword … En garde! With steel and wit I play you at first abord … At the last line, I hit! [They begin fencing] You should have been politer; Where had you best be gored? The left side or the right — ah? Or next your azure cord? Or where the spleen is stored? Or in the stomach pit? Come we to quick accord … At the last line, I hit! You falter, you turn whiter? You do so to afford Your foe a rhyme in "iter"? … You thrust at me — I ward — And balance is restored. Laridon! Look to your spit! … No, you shall not be floored Before my cue to hit! [He announces solemnly] Envoi Prince, call upon the Lord! … I skirmish … feint a bit … I lunge! … I keep my word! [The Vicomte staggers, Cyrano bows.] At the last line, I hit!"

"Call no one. Leave me not; When you come back, I should be gone for aye."

"Live, for I love you!"

"No, In fairy tales When to the ill-starred Prince the lady says "I love you!" all his ugliness fades fast — But I remain the same, up to the last!"

"You blessed my life! Never on me had rested woman's love. My mother even could not find me fair: I had no sister; and, when grown a man, I feared the mistress who would mock at me. But I have had your friendship — grace to you A woman's charm has passed across my path."

"I loved but once, yet twice I lose my love!"

"Rhymer, brawler, and musician, Famed for his lunar expedition, And the unnumbered duels he fought, — And lover also, — by interposition! — Here lies Hercule Savinien De Cyrano de Bergerac, Who was everything, yet was naught. I cry you pardon, but I may not stay; See, the moon-ray that comes to call me hence! I would not bid you mourn less faithfully That good, brave Christian: I would only ask That when my body shall be cold in clay You wear those sable mourning weeds for two, And mourn awhile for me, in mourning him."

"What say you? It is useless? Ay, I know But who fights ever hoping for success? I fought for lost cause, and for fruitless quest! You there, who are you! — You are thousands! Ah! I know you now, old enemies of mine! Falsehood! Have at you! Ha! and Compromise! Prejudice, Treachery! … Surrender, I? Parley? No, never! You too, Folly, — you? I know that you will lay me low at last; Let be! Yet I fall fighting, fighting still!"

"You strip from me the laurel and the rose! Take all! Despite you there is yet one thing I hold against you all, and when, tonight, I enter Christ's fair courts, and, lowly bowed, Sweep with doffed casque the heavens' threshold blue, One thing is left, that, void of stain or smutch, I bear away despite you … My panache."

"Malebranche dirait qu’il n’y a plus une âme: Nous pensons humblement qu’il reste encor des cœurs."

"Sans doute Je peux apprendre à coqueriquer: je glougloute."

"Et sonnant d’avance sa victoire, Mon chant jaillit si net, si fier, si peremptoire Que l’horizon, saisi d'un rose tremblement, M’obéit."

"Je recule Ébloui de me voir moi même tout vermeil Et d’avoir, moi, le coq, fait élever le soleil."

"I suspect that the playwright Edmond Rostand accurately portrays his ability as a swordsman; Cyrano was something of a legend in his own time."

"Les ondulations de ces montagnes infinies, que leurs couches de neige semblaient rendre écumantes, rappelaient à mon souvenir la surface d'une mer agitée. Si je me retournais vers l'ouest, l'Océan s'y développait dans sa majestueuse étendue, comme une continuation de ces sommets moutonneux. Où finissait la terre, où commençaient les flots, mon oeil le distinguait à peine.'Je me plongeais ainsi dans cette prestigieuse extase que donnent les hautes cimes, et cette fois, sans vertige, car je m'accoutumais enfin à ces sublimes contemplations. Mes regards éblouis se baignaient dans la transparente irradiation des rayons solaires, j'oubliais qui j'étais, où j'étais, pour vivre de la vie des elfes ou des sylphes, imaginaires habitants de la mythologie scandinave; je m'enivrais de la volupté des hauteurs, sans songer aux abîmes dans lesquels ma destinée allait me plonger avant peu."

"Mais aux grandes douleurs le ciel mêle incessamment les grandes joies, et il réservait au professeur Lidenbrock une satisfaction égale à ses désespérants ennuis."

"Les objets extérieurs ont une action réelle sur le cerveau. Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. Que de prisonniers cellulaires devenus imbéciles, sinon fous, par le défaut d’exercice des facultés pensantes."

"Je ne puis peindre mon désespoir; nul mot de la langue humaine ne rendrait mes sentiments. J’étais enterré vif, avec la perspective de mourir dans les tortures de la faim et de la soif."

"La science, mon garçon, est faite d’erreurs, mais d’erreurs qu’il est bon de commettre, car elles mènent peu à peu à la vérité."

"Le grand architecte de l'univers l'a construite on bons matériaux."

"Hunger, prolonged, is temporary madness! The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. I was likely to understand it now."

"L’homme est ainsi fait, que sa santé est un effet purement négatif; une fois le besoin de manger satisfait, on se figure difficilement les horreurs de la faim; il faut les éprouver, pour les comprendre."

"Et tant que son coeur bat, tant que sa chair palpite, je n'admets pas qu'un être doué de volonté laisse en lui place au désespoir."

"Or, quand un Américain a une idée, il cherche un second Américain qui la partage. Sont-ils trois, ils élisent un président et deux secrétaires. Quatre, ils nomment un archiviste, et le bureau fonctionne. Cinq, ils se convoquent en assemblée générale, et le club est constitué."

"Rien ne saurait étonner un Américain. On a souvent répété que le mot "impossible" n’était pas français; on s’est évidemment trompé de dictionnaire. En Amérique, tout est facile, tout est simple, et quant aux difficultés mécaniques, elles sont mortes avant d’être nées. Entre le projet Barbicane et sa réalisation, pas un véritable Yankee ne se fût permis d’entrevoir l’apparence d’une difficulté. Chose dite, chose faite."

"L’astre des nuits, par sa proximité relative et le spectacle rapidement renouvelé de ses phases diverses, a tout d’abord partagé avec le Soleil l’attention des habitants de la Terre."

"Restait en dernier lieu la classe superstitieuse des ignorants; ceux-lá ne se contentent pas d'ignorer, ils savent ce qui n'est pas."

"Ils faisaient à autrui ce qu'ils ne voulaient pas qu'on leur fît, principe immoral sur lequel repose tout l’art de la guerre."

"À en croire certains esprits bornés, — c'est le qualificatif qui leur convient, — l'humanité serait renfermée dans un cercle de Popilius qu'elle ne saurait franchir, et condamnée à végéter sur ce globe sans jamais pouvoir s'élancer dans les espaces planétaires! Il n'en est rien! On va aller à la Lune, on ira aux planètes, on ira aux étoiles, comme on va aujourd'hui de Liverpool à New York, facilement, rapidement, sûrement, et l'océan atmosphérique sera bientôt traversé comme les océans de la Lune!"

"L'esprit humain se plaît à ces conceptions grandioses d'êtres surnaturels. Or la mer est précisément leur meilleur véhicule, le seul milieu où ces géants près desquels les animaux terrestres, éléphants ou rhinocéros, ne sont que des nains — puissent se produire et se développer."

"Qui dit Canadien, dit Français."

"Cet enlèvement, si brutalement exécuté, s'était accompli avec la rapidité de l'éclair... Un rapide frisson me glaça l'épiderme. A qui avions-nous affaire ? Sans doute à quelques pirates d'une nouvelle espèce qui exploitaient la mer à leur façon.A peine l'étroit panneau fut-il refermé sur moi, qu'une obscurité profonde m'enveloppa."

"Nous étions seuls. Où ? Je ne pouvais le dire, à peine l'imaginer. Tout était noir, mais d'un noir si absolu, qu'après quelques minutes, mes yeux n'avaient encore pu saisir une de ces lueurs indéterminées qui flottent dans les plus profondes nuits."

"A quoi bon discuter une proposition semblable, quand la force peut détruire les meilleurs arguments."

"La mer est tout! Elle couvre les sept dixièmes du globe terrestre. Son souffle est pur et sain. C'est l'immense désert où l'homme n'est jamais seul, car il sent frémir la vie à ses côtés. La mer n'est que le véhicule d'une surnaturelle et prodigieuse existence; elle n'est que mouvement et amour."

"Les différences chronologiques s'effacent dans la mémoire des morts."

"Ce ne sont pas de nouveaux continents qu'il faut à la terre, mais de nouveaux hommes!"

"Le Nautilus en brisait les eaux sous le tranchant de son éperon, après avoir accompli près de dix mille lieues en trois mois et demi, parcours supérieur à l'un des grands cercles de la terre. Où allions-nous maintenant, et que nous réservait l'avenir?"

"La liberté vaut qu’on la paye."

"On ne saurait empêcher l'équilibre de produire ses effets. On peut braver les lois humaines, mais non résister aux lois naturelles."

"Voici la conclusion de ce voyage sous les mers. Ce qui se passa pendant cette nuit, comment le canot échappa au formidable remous du Maelstrom, comment Ned Land, Conseil et moi, nous sortîmes du gouffre, je ne saurai le dire."

"Hobson constata, non sans une certaine appréhension, que les ours étaient nombreux sur cette partie du territoire. Il était rare, en effet, qu'un jour se passât sans qu'un couple de ces formidables carnassiers ne fût signalé. Bien des coups de fusil furent adressés à ces terribles visiteurs. Tantôt, c'était une bande de ces ours bruns qui sont fort communs sur toute la région de la Terre-Maudite, tantôt, une de ces familles d'ours polaires d'une taille gigantesque, que les premiers froids amèneraient sans doute en plus grand nombre aux environs du cap Bathurst. Et, en effet, dans les récits d'hivernage, on peut observer que les explorateurs ou les baleiniers sont plusieurs fois par jour exposés à la rencontre de ces carnassiers."

"Quant à voir la ville, il n'y pensait même pas, étant de cette race d'Anglais qui font visiter par leur domestique les pays qu'ils traversent."

"Personne n'ignore que l'Inde — ce grand triangle renversé dont la base est au nord et la pointe au sud — comprend une superficie de quatorze cent mille milles carrés, sur laquelle est inégalement répandue une population de cent quatre-vingts millions d'habitants. Le gouvernement britannique exerce une domination réelle sur une certaine partie de cet immense pays. Il entretient un gouverneur général à Calcutta, des gouverneurs à Madras, à Bombay, au Bengale, et un lieutenant-gouverneur à Agra.'Mais l'Inde anglaise proprement dite ne compte qu'une superficie de sept cent mille milles carrés et une population de cent à cent dix millions d'habitants. C'est assez dire qu'une notable partie du territoire échappe encore à l'autorité de la reine; et, en effet, chez certains rajahs de l'intérieur, farouches et terribles, l'indépendance indoue est encore absolue."

"Qu'un Anglais comme lui fît le tour du monde un sac à la main, passe encore; mais une femme ne pouvait entreprendre une pareille traversée dans ces conditions."

"Phileas Fogg avait gagné son pari. Il avait accompli en quatre-vingts jours ce voyage autour du monde ! Il avait employé pour ce faire tous les moyens de transport, paquebots, railways, voitures, yachts, bâtiments de commerce, traîneaux, éléphant. L'excentrique gentleman avait déployé dans cette affaire ses merveilleuses qualités de sang-froid et d'exactitude. Mais après ? Qu'avait-il gagné à ce déplacement ? Qu'avait-il rapporté de ce voyage ?'Rien, dira-t-on ? Rien, soit, si ce n'est une charmante femme, qui — quelque invraisemblable que cela puisse paraître — le rendit le plus heureux des hommes !'En vérité, ne ferait-on pas, pour moins que cela, le Tour du Monde ?"

"Mieux vaut mettre les choses au pis tout de suite, répondit l’ingénieur, et ne se réserver que la surprise du mieux."

"La nécessité est, d’ailleurs, de tous les maîtres, celui qu’on écoute le plus et qui enseigne le mieux."

"L’homme qui "sait" réussit là où d’autres végéteraient et périraient inévitablement."

"L’homme n’est jamais ni parfait, ni content."

"Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements... and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some inexplicable law, appear to agree and become complete at the same time. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future!"

"Malheur à qui est seul, mes amis, et il faut croire que l’isolement a vite fait de détruire la raison."

"Les hommes, Pencroff, si savants qu’ils puissent être, ne pourront jamais changer quoi que ce soit à l’ordre cosmographique établi par Dieu même.'— Et pourtant, ajouta Pencroff, qui montra une certaine difficulté à se résigner, le monde est bien savant! Quel gros livre, monsieur Cyrus, on ferait avec tout ce qu’on sait!'— Et quel plus gros livre encore avec tout ce qu’on ne sait pas, répondit Cyrus Smith."

"Ainsi est-il du cœur de l’homme. Le besoin de faire œuvre qui dure, qui lui survive, est le signe de sa supériorité sur tout ce qui vit ici-bas. C’est ce qui a fondé sa domination, et c’est ce qui la justifie dans le monde entier."

"La civilisation ne recule jamais, et il semble qu’elle emprunte tous les droits à la nécessité."

"Celui qui se trompe dans une intention qu’il croit bonne, on peut le combattre, on ne cesse pas de l’estimer."

"Les poëtes sont comme les proverbes : l’un est toujours là pour contredire l’autre."

"I would have bartered a diamond mine for a glass of pure spring water!"

"(What books did you read as a child?) I read Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, and all the detective novels I could lay my hands on."

"In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age."

"It was Jules Verne who launched me on this trip."

"Almost as influential as my natural penchant was a marvelous book, which impressed and fascinated me more than any other—Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. I have re-read it many times, and I confess I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood."

"All my texts were written, directly or allusively, to celebrate (Captain Hatteras's) discovery of the North Pole."

"Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life. When I was not more than ten or eleven years old I read his Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and my young imagination was fired. This generation may have forgotten that Verne was a great scientist as well as the writer of the most romantic fiction of his day."

"For twenty years, the people who move forward have been doing a Jules Verne."

"We found a text in a translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that mentioned Villeroi as the math teacher to Jules Verne. They were from the same city."

"I would also like, in these notes, to pay homage to that man of incommensurable genius, namely Jules Verne. My admiration for him is boundless. In certain pages of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, The Mysterious Island and Hector Servadac, he raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language. [...] O incomparable master, may you be blessed for the sublime hours which I have spent endlessly reading and rereading your works through my life."

"Je voudrais aussi, dans ces notes, rendre hommage à l’homme d’incommensurable génie que fut Jules Verne. Mon admiration pour lui est infinie. Dans certaines pages du Voyage au centre de la terre, de Cinq Semaines en ballon, de Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, de De la Terre à la Lune et de Autour de la Lune, de l’Île mystérieuse, d’Hector Servadac, il s’est élevé aux plus hautes cimes que puisse atteindre le verbe humain. [...] Ô maître incomparable, soyez béni pour les heures sublimes que j’ai passées toute ma vie à vous lire et à vous relire sans cesse."

"With the vast sweep of his imagination Jules Verne created a whole world of magical things imbued with a delightful naiveté, which just charm us..."

"Veliká fantazie Julesa Vernea vytvořila svět, kouzelný svět plný rozkošné naivity, která je tolik půvabná..."

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."

"L'existence du Soldat est (après la peine de mort) la trace la plus douloureuse de barbarie qui subsiste parmi les hommes."

"Tout homme a vu le mur qui borne son esprit."

"L'histoire est un roman dont le peuple est l'auteur."

"On étouffe les clameurs, mais comment se venger du silence?"

"Un désespoir paisible, sans convulsions de colère et sans reproches au ciel est la sagesse même."

"Les acteurs sont bien heureux, ils ont une gloire sans responsabilité."

"La presse est une bouche forcée d'être toujours ouverte et de parler toujours. De là vient qu'elle dit mille fois qu'elle n'a rien à dire."

"Un livre est une bouteille jetée en pleine mer sur laquelle il faut coller cette étiquette: attrape qui peut."

"Le théâtre n'a jamais été en Angleterre qu'une mode des hautes classes ou une débauche du bas peuple."

"I was always fascinated with the 1820s, that romantic decade, and the revolution of 1830 which was of course a disaster everywhere, and 1848. I still read with great joy about that period, I don't know why. It's funny how you find a decade, or a period or a place that you just respond to. (“It is a long time ago, and it's a very confused period…”) Very confused, yes. Very good writers you had in France particularly, Vigny, people like that, oh! I love Vigny, and they meant a great deal to me, those people. I haven't read them for many, many years. But they also shaped my view of the world."

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

"It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present."

"However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself."

"Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones."

"All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth."

"Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being."

"The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics."

"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."

"With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows."

"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life."

"There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity."

"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."

"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape."

"Suicidez-vous, désespérés, et vous, torturés du corps et de l'âme, perdez tout espoir. Il n'y a plus pour vous de soulagement en ce monde. Le monde vit de vos charniers."

"Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them."

"You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?... We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone."

"When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach."

"The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre."

"Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all."

"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us."

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."

"It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation."

"It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius."

"It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior."

"I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."

"But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes."

"And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths."

"[Nietzsche’s] definition of cruelty informs Artaud’s own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience … Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis …"

"Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them."

"It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him."

"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."

"Ce qui remplit le temps c'est vraiment de le perdre."

"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."

"Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny."

"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it."

"Writing is not speaking. It's silencing yourself. It's screaming without noise."

"There is no vacation from love, it doesn't exist. Love, you must live it fully, with its boredom and all, there is no possible vacation from that."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Contre nous de la tyrannie, L'étendard sanglant est levé, (bis) Entendez-vous dans les campagnes Mugir ces féroces soldats? Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes! Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons!"

"To arms! to arms! ye brave! The avenging sword unsheathe! March on! march on! all hearts resolved On victory or death!"

"Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon cœur D'une langueur Monotone."

"Et je m'en vais Au vent mauvais Qui m'emporte Deçà, delà, Pareil à la Feuille morte."

"La lune blanche Luit dans les bois; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramée."

"Il pleure dans mon cœur Comme il pleut sur la ville. Quelle est cette langueur Qui pénètre mon cœur?"

"C'est bien la pire peine De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon cœur a tant de peine!"

"Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà Pleurant sans cesse, Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà De ta jeunesse?"

"De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose. Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise: Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint."

"Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!"

"Prends l'éloquence et tords-lui son cou! Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie, Du rendre un peu la Rime assagie. Si l'on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où? Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime! Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou Nous a forgé ce bijou d'un sou Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime?"

"Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Éparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym… Et tout le reste est littérature."

"Anna Margolin was greatly influenced by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud; among the Germans, by Else Lasker-Schüler and Rainer Maria Rilke; and among the Yiddish poets, by Itsik Manger and Avrom Sutzkever."

"That time, that excitement, I will always remember,/like a song without words, like a poem by Verlaine."

"Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia."

"Verlaine, the maudit poet, but with a strong religious torment that ended up prevailing, speaking of the love for Mary: «all other loves are orders». With similar words, he wanted to underline that "free" character of Marian devotion that the Church has always safeguarded. Over 20 centuries, only a few dogmas have been proclaimed about her di lei: which among other things, we know, are at the service and shelter of her di lei Son di lei, well before her di lei. Only to these defined truths does the Catholic owe homage. Everything else, regarding Mary, is left to the free sensitivity and initiative of the believer."

"Théâtre des ris et des pleurs Lit! où je nais, et où je meurs, Tu nous fais voir comment voisins Sont nos plaisirs et chagrins."

"De cette alliance nouvelle, car jusqu'ici les décors et les costumes, d'une part, la choréographie, d'autre part, n'avaient entre eux qu'un lien factice, il est résulté, dans Parade, une sorte de sur-réalisme."

"La géométrie est aux arts plastiques ce que la grammaire est à l'art de l'écrivain."

"The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking.I am trying to renew poetic style,but within a classical framework.On the other hand,I don't want to lapse into imitating others.Letter to Picasso 1918"

"A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine"

"Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure"

"L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante L'amour s'en va Comme la vie est lente Et comme l'Espérance est violente"

"Passent les jours et passent les semaines Ni temps passé Ni les amours reviennent"

"Mon beau navire ô ma mémoire Avons-nous assez navigué Dans une onde mauvaise à boire Avons-nous assez divagué De la belle aube au triste soir"

"Adieu faux amour confondu Avec la femme qui s'éloigne Avec celle que j'ai perdue L'année dernière en Allemagne Et que je ne reverrai plus Voie lactée ô sœur lumineuse Des blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan Et des corps blancs des amoureuses Nageurs morts suivrons-nous d’ahan Ton cours vers d'autres nébuleuses"

"Moi qui sais des lais pour les reines Les complaintes de mes années Des hymnes d'esclave aux murènes La romance du mal-aimé Et des chansons pour les sirènes"

"Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s'empoisonne"

"Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines"

"Un jour Un jour je m'attendais moi-même Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes Pour que je sache enfin celui-là que je suis Moi qui connais les autres"

"Je passais au bord de la Seine Un livre ancien sous le bras Le fleuve est pareil à ma peine Il s'écoule et ne tarit pas Quand donc finira la semaine"

"J'ai cueilli ce brin de bruyère L'automne est morte souviens-t'en Nous ne nous verrons plus sur terre Odeur du temps brin de bruyère Et souviens-toi que je t'attends"

"Passons passons puisque tout passe Je me retournerai souvent Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent"

"Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu'un vivant peut connaître Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l'amour Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées Connaissant plusieurs langages Ayant pas mal voyagé Ayant vu la guerre dans l'Artillerie et l'lnfanterie Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l'effroyable lutte Je sais d'ancien et de nouveau autant qu'un homme seul pourrait des deux savoir"

"Nous voulons explorer la bonté contrée énorme où tout se tait"

"Voici que vient l'été la saison violente Et ma jeunesse est morte ainsi que le printemps Ô soleil c'est le temps de la raison ardente"

"Ô bouches l'homme est a la recherche d'un nouveau langage Auquel le grammairien d'aucune langue n'aura rien à dire"

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."

"Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew."

"Ce qui fait le poète, n'est-ce pas l'amour, la recherche désespérée du moindre rayon de soleil d'autrefois jouant sur le parquet d'une chambre d'enfant?"

"Le mythe de Prométhée signifie que toute la tristesse du monde a son siège dans le foie. Mais qui oserait reconnaître une vérité si humble?"

"On atteint aisément une âme vivante à travers les crimes, les vices les plus tristes, mais la vulgarité est infranchissable."

"Presque tous les hommes ressemblent à ces grands palais déserts dont le propriétaire n'habite que quelques pièces; et il ne pénètre jamais dans les ailes condamnées."

"Où finit la correction? Où commence le martyre? Dans l'entre-deux, des milliers d'enfants peuplent un enfer qui ne fait pas de bruit."

"Il s'en est fallu de très peu que les larmes de Judas ne fussent confondues, dans le souvenir des hommes, avec celles de Pierre. Il aurait pu devenir un saint, le patron de nous tous qui ne cessons de trahir."

"J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je suis heureux qu’il y en ait deux."

"Il y a une chose plus triste à perdre que la vie, c’est la raison de vivre, Plus triste que de perdre ses biens, c’est de perdre son espérance."

"Il n'y a pour les choses et pour les poèmes qu'une seule manière d'être nouveaux, c'est d'être vrais et qu'une seule manière d'être jeunes, c'est d'être éternels."

"Si l'ordre est le plaisir de la raison, le désordre est le délice de l'imagination."

"In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne."

"Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its ‘manner,’ in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself."

"J'avais complètement oublié la religion et j'étais à son égard d'une ignorance sauvage. La première lueur de vérité me fut donnée par la rencontre des livres d'un grand poète, à qui je dois une éternelle reconnaissance, et qui a eu dans la formation de ma pensée une part prépondérante, Arthur Rimbaud. La lecture des Illuminations, puis, quelques mois après, d'Une Saison en enfer, fut pour moi un événement capital. Pour la première fois, ces livres ouvraient une fissure dans mon bagne matérialiste et me donnaient l'impression vivante et presque physique du surnaturel."

"“During Humankind’s long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed.”"

"“Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious “right” a revolution was fought.” (Voters' strike)"

"Le plus grand danger de la bombe est dans l'explosion de bêtise qu'elle provoque."

"“When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.” (Diary of a Chambermaid)"

"“Each footstep taken in this society bristles with privileges, and is marked with a bloodstain; each turn of the government machinery grinds the tumbling, gasping flesh of the poor; and tears are running from everywhere in the impenetrable night of suffering. Facing these endless murders and continuous tortures, what's the meaning of society, this crumbling wall, this collapsing staircase?”"

"“Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”"

"“Dead trees enclosed the bodies of men and women, violently distorted and subjected to hideous and shameful tortures.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.”"

"“Every intellectual effort is bent towards committing the most diversified violations upon the human being.”"

"“Honesty is negative and sterile; it is ignorant of the correct evaluation of appetite and ambition – the only powers through which you can found anything durable.”"

"“I feel something like a powerful oppression, like an immense fatigue after marching across fever-laden jungles, or by the shores of deadly lakes…And I am flooded by discouragement, so that it seems I shall never be able to escape from myself again.”"

"“I had, at that moment, another soul – an almost divine soul, a creative and sacrificial soul.”"

"“It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of upper-class existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“It isn’t dying that’s sad. It’s living when you’re not happy.”"

"“Murder is born in love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“Nature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“Schools are miniature universes. They encompass, on a child’s scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies. A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.” (Sébastien Roch)"

"“There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.”"

"“There is something more mysteriously attractive than beauty: it is corruption.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why... why?” (Diary ot a Chambermaid)"

"“To take something from a person and keep it for oneself: that is robbery. To take something from one person and then turn it over to another in exchange for as much money as you can get: that is business. Robbery is so much more stupid, since it is satisfied with a single, frequently dangerous profit; whereas in business it can be doubled without danger.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.” (Garden of Tortures)"

"J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."

"Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées."

"La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."

"Nous ne pouvons arracher une seule page de notre vie, mais nous pouvons jeter le livre au feu."

"Mais, fat impudent, tu ne veux pas qu'on te pardonne, tu veux qu'on croie ou qu'on prétende n'avoir rien à te pardonner. Tu veux qu'on baise la main qui frappe et la bouche qui ment."

"Thank God that one ridiculing is not enough for ambitious youth, which expands and refines itself by means of a thousand errors and mistakes, owing to the powerful engine of self-love. My friend, we often spoke of those among our contemporaries in whom we saw personality developing in frightening excess; we saw them do much evil while desiring to do good. Sometimes we made fun of them, often on several occasions; more often we pitied them. But we always loved them, nevertheless!"

"...exploiters are sometimes duped by their own egotism...the devoted don't always lack happiness. I proved nothing; one proves nothing with stories, not even true ones; but good people have consciences that bolster them, and it's for them above all that I wrote this book, in which so much malice has been perceived. They do me too much honor: I would much rather belong to the poorer class of suckers than the more illustrious one of the jokers. "Notice" (1852) in Horace, translated from French to English by Zack Rogow (1995)"

"La vie est une longue blessure qui s'endort rarement et ne se guérit jamais."

"L'art est une démonstration dont la nature est la preuve."

"L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche...."

"Les chefs-d'oeuvre ne sont jamais que des tentatives heureuses."

"L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale."

"Je vois sur leurs nobles fronts le sceau du Seigneur, car ils sont nés rois de la terre bien mieux que ceux qui la possèdent pour l'avoir payée."

"Tous, quand nous avons un peu de loisir et d'argent, nous voyageons, ou plutôt nous fuyons, car il ne s'agit pas tant de voyager que de partir, entendez-vous? Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas quelque douleur à distraire ou quelque joug à secouer?"

"Dans les jours orageux de la jeunesse, on s'imagine que la solitude est le grand refuge contre les atteintes, le grand remède aux blessures du combat; c'est une grave erreur, et l'expérience de la vie nous apprend que, là ou l'on ne peut vivre en paix avec ses semblables, il n'est point d'admiration poétique ni de jouissances d'art capables de combler l'abîme qui se creuse au fond de l'âme."

"The author of these novellas has never had a system as to the priority of one sex over the other. He has always believed in the perfect natural equality between the sexes which is in no way altered by the diversity of their functions, since each sex finds its superiority in exercising the function that nature and Providence have accorded it."

"one should always judge youth leniently. Certainly it would be unfair to pass dogmatic judgment upon what is spontaneous and consequently naïve."

"On est heureux par soi-même quand on sait s'y prendre, avoir des goûts simples, un certain courage, une certaine abnégation, l'amour du travail et avant tout une bonne conscience."

"Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."

"Apprendre à voir, voilà tout le secret des études naturelles."

"La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."

"What is it that you think about, Sleeping Beauty, as you ride along the country lanes on that skinny mare of yours? And not so much of a beauty either, come to think of it. Too skinny, too pale, too dull. Not a glimmer of sparkle in those big dark eyes. Still, I do wonder, when you're riding past the hedges, little dreaming you are watched, I wonder what exactly it is you go out for. What sort of things are going through your mind? You look straight ahead, far into the distance and I wonder, do your thoughts travel that far too, or do they stay close to home, wrapped up in yourself?"

"Here I am, worried and anxious; there she is, serenity incarnate. How can she appear before me like a human reproach? Like an ironic comment on my own life. How can she never suspect I might be miserable? Unlike myself, she is not protected by a mature, philosophical outlook on existence. Compared to me she is a child. No struggle has tested her strength, no disappointment has yet caused her spirit to waver. But that's it, by God! That's the very reason she is the stronger. She has lost nothing of herself. She has not been devoured by vultures and wolves! She is untouched. She lives life to the full. However feeble the flame within her it is enough to light her way. But as for me, the fire in my heart burns me alive."

"Je n'appelle pas priere un choix et un arrangement de paroles lancees vers le ciel, mais un entretien de la pensee avec l'ideal de lumiere et de perfections infinies."

"It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"Three years ago in Saint-Front, an ugly little town that you won't find on any map, something happened that caused quite a stir. It wasn't particularly interesting and few people heard of it, but it had serious consequences. (first lines)"

"Laurence did what all predestined artists do: she suffered through all the misery, all the agony of unrecognized, unappreciated talent. (I)"

"People who live in a calm retreat have a marvelous instinct for imagining storms and disasters in other people's lives, and they secretly rejoice at having avoided them themselves. It is a consolation that must be allowed these people, since pride, too, has its needs, and virtue alone cannot always compensate for long hours of boredom and solitude. (II)"

"It would be a serious mistake to assume that provincial prejudices are difficult to overcome. Whatever people say about this, one can easily win or lose their goodwill by one's presence and behavior. Some say that time is a great healer: in the provinces, it is boredom which brings about change and its justification. Any kind of change in the routine of a small town appears awful at first; but after a while people recognize that it wasn't so terrible, and that, indeed, a thousand curious but timid souls were just waiting for an example to be set, to launch themselves into a career of innovation. (III)"

"...her soul began to blossom and, within her soul, the drama of her life began to unfold. (III)"

"Those who inspire in us the greatest affection are not always those for whom we have the highest regard. Tenderness does not require admiration and enthusiasm: it is based on a feeling of equality which makes us seek out in a friend a peer, a man subject to our own passions, our own weaknesses. Veneration demands a different sort of affection than that continuously openhearted intimacy we call friendship. I would have a very poor opinion of a man who could not love what he admired; I would have an even worse opinion of a man who could love only what he admired. This applies merely to friendship. Love is a different creature entirely: it lives only on enthusiasm, and all that injures its feverish delicacy blights and withers it. But the sweetest of all human emotions, the one that is nourished by calamities and mistakes as well as by greatness and heroic acts, the one that spans every stage of life, that begins to develop in us from our very first sensation of being, and that endures as long as we do, the one that parallels and actually lengthens our life, that is reborn from its ashes and that reties itself as tightly and just as firmly after being broken; that emotion, alas! is not love, as you well know, but friendship. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"Without our even realizing it, literature performs its miracles. It revives the poetry of former days; and, putting to rest in the past all that had been for intellectuals of the past the object of just criticisms, it brings to us, like a forgotten perfume, the unrecognized riches of a taste that is no longer open to discussion, since it no longer reigns arbitrarily. Art, although it poses as egotistical ("art for art's sake"), creates progressive philosophy without realizing it. It makes its peace with the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, to preserve, as in a museum, the monuments of its conquest. (chapter 18)"

"[He] was a good man but no where near as good a philosopher. His mind was lofty, rather than broad; that is to say that he had more capacity for enthusiasm than for investigation. There was only room in that ardent brain for one idea, and that was the idea of revolution. (Chapter 21)"

"the French common people, particularly in the major cities, are considered to have infinite wit. I question the epithet. Wit only exists when one is purified by a taste that the people cannot have, this taste itself being the result of certain vices of civilization which are not those of the people. So the people have no wit, from my point of view. They have more than that: they have poetry, they have genius. With them, form is nothing. They don't waste their minds hunting for it; they take it as it comes to them. But their thoughts are full of grandeur and power, because they rest on the principle of eternal justice, disregarded by societies and preserved in their hearts. When this principle sees the light of day, no matter how it is expressed, it startles and strikes like the lightning of divine truth. (chapter 11)"

""Up till now," I said to myself, "there's been something too personal about his ambition, which portrayed the future in the light of egotism. Now that he's in love, his soul will open to ideas that are more ample, truer, more generous. Devotion will reveal itself to him, and with devotion, the need and the courage to work." (chapter 13)"

"The sorrows of love, the torment of remorse, even the worries of destitution hadn't seriously unsettled him; but the deep wound sustained by his vanity was more than enough to punish him. Unfortunately, it was not enough to correct him. (Chapter 32)"

"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance And answers roar for roar, as spirits can: I would some mild miraculous thunder ran Above the applauded circus, in appliance Of thine own nobler nature's strength and science, Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan, From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place With holier light! that thou to woman's claim And man's, mightst join beside the angel's grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame"

"Why call George Sand a wild woman in the publicity for her books? I protest the use of such an inaccurate epithet for such a cultivated and intelligent woman"

"If the author of the romantic creed was Rousseau, its popularizer and vulgarizer was George Sand."

"Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any modern language—at least. As passionate as Rousseau, & far more picturesque. No writer perhaps ever possessed so fine an eye for nature or could convey the results with such picturesque precision."

"She was a woman of almost unprecedented intelligence and talent – a name that has gone down in history, a name that is destined not to be forgotten and not to disappear from European humanity... from my very first reading at the age of sixteen I was amazed by the strangeness of the contradiction between what was written and said about her and what I myself could see in fact. In actual fact, many, or at least some, of her heroines represented a type of such sublime moral purity as could not be imagined without a most thorough moral scrutiny within the poet’s own soul; without the acceptance of one’s full responsibility; without an understanding and a recognition of the most sublime beauty and mercy, patience, and justice."

"She had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity."

"There were plenty of women writing, different kinds of women, you know...How come they did it?...How brave George Sand was!...The miracle is what women have done in this world. It’s miraculous that they did the work they did on such a high level. Where did they do it? And wearing the clothes they were wearing?"

"What time the gifted lady took Away from paper, pen, and book, She spent in amorous dalliance (They do those things so well in France)."

"Jane Harrison, the great classical anthropologist, wrote in 1914 in a letter to her friend Gilbert Murray: "By the by, about "Women," it has bothered me often-why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex-why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?... Is it mere convention and propriety, or something deeper?"...One answer to Jane Harrison's question has to be that historically men and women have played very different parts in each others' lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter's model and the poet's muse, but also as comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant, and copyist of manuscripts, man has played a quite different role for the female artist. Henry James repeats an incident which the writer Prosper Mérimée described, of how, while he was living with George Sand, "he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red madras round her head, making bravely, with her own hands the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardor and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence, and her industry a reproof-the result of all which was a lively irritation and an early rupture." The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the misnaming and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival."

"No part of George Sand's Memoirs is more interesting than the description of the development of her own genius. To remember the dreams and confusions of childhood, never to lose the recollections of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the gifts of the poetic character."

"I have to confess that when I began translating Horace, I was not aware of George Sand's many gifts as a novelist. Of course I admired her outlandish behavior, that cigar-smoking woman who bushwhacked her way through the nineteenth century, wearing men's clothes when she went out hunting or when she attended the Paris theater. I enjoyed the stories of her amorous adventures, how she became the lover of famous composers, revolutionaries, writers, and actors, not all of them male. All of that is part of George Sand. But I discovered in reading this book that George Sand the historical figure is only a small corner of the picture. Sand...had a style and vocabulary that were the admiration of her literary colleagues, a wide-ranging knowledge of politics and religion, and a wonderfully catty wit, all of which she used ably in her work. Horace is one of the best examples of these skills in her oeuvre. One of Sand's most winning qualities as a novelist, though, is her empathy for her characters, an empathy that leaps over barriers of gender, class, and age."

"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

"Établissons donc ici, pour les dictionnaires à venir, que le Demi-Monde ne représente pas, comme on le croit, comme on l'imprime, la cohue des courtisanes, mais la classe des déclassées."

"Ce monde commence où l'épouse légale finit, et il finit où l'épouse vénale commence, il est séparé des honnêtes femmes par le scandale, des courtisanes par l'argent."

"Les affaires, c'est bien simple, c'est l'argent des autres."

"On peut devenir un peintre, un sculpteur, un musicien même à force d'étude; on ne devient pas un auteur dramatique. On l'est tout de suite ou jamais, comme on est blond ou brun, sans le vouloir."

"N'estime l'argent ni plus ni moins qu'il ne vaut: c'est un bon serviteur et un mauvais maître."

"Il faut aimer n'importe qui, n'importe quoi, n'importe comment, pourvu qu'on aime."

"Les hommes et les femmes ne se réunissent au théâtre que pour entendre parler de l'amour, et pour prendre part aux douleurs et aux joies qu'il cause. Tous les autres intérêts de l'humanité restent à la porte."

"Le christianisme est là avec sa merveilleuse parabole de l'enfant prodigue pour nous conseiller l'indulgence et le pardon. Jésus était plein d'amour pour ces âmes blessées par les passions des hommes, et dont il aimait à panser les plaies en tirant le baume qui devait les guérir des plaies elles-mêmes. Ainsi, il disait à Madeleine : - "il te sera beaucoup remis parce que tu as beaucoup aimé", sublime pardon qui devait éveiller une foi sublime. Pourquoi nous ferions-nous plus rigides que le Christ ? Pourquoi, nous en tenant obstinément aux opinions de ce monde qui se fait dur pour qu'on le croie fort, rejetterions-nous avec lui des âmes saignantes souvent de blessures par où, comme le mauvais sang d'un malade, s'épanche le mal de leur passé, et n'attendant qu'une main amie qui les panse et leur rende la convalescence du coeur ?"

"Although I work, and seldom cease, At Dumas pere and Dumas fils, Alas, I cannot make me care For Dumas fils and Dumas pere."

"I sit beside my lonely fire And pray for wisdom yet: For calmness to remember Or courage to forget."

"Do you recall that night in June Upon the Danube River; We listened to the ländler-tune, We watched the moonbeams quiver."

"C'est la vraie voix féminine de l'orchestre, voix passionnée et chaste en même temps, déchirante et douce, qui pleure et crie et se lamente, ou chante et prie et rêve, ou éclate en accents joyeux, comme nulle autre pourrait le faire."

"L'auteur de ce Prophète a non seulement le bonheur d'avoir du talent, mais aussi le talent d'avoir du bonheur."

"Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur est qu'il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves."

"Pauvres diables!... D'où sortent ces malheureux êtres ?... À quel Montfaucon vont-ils mourir ?... Que leur octroie la munificence municipale pour nettoyer (ou salir) ainsi le pavé de Paris ?... À quel âge les envoie-t-on à l'équarrissage ?... Que fait-on de leurs os ? (leur peau n'est bonne à rien.)"

"Cette face de l’instrumentation est exactement, en musique, ce que le coloris est en peinture."

"Un chanteur ou une cantatrice capable de chanter seize mesures seulement de bonne musique avec une voix naturelle, bien posée, sympathique, et de les chanter sans efforts, sans écarteler la phrase, sans exagérer jusqu'à la charge les accents, sans platitude, sans afféterie, sans mièvreries, sans fautes de français, sans liaisons dangereuses, sans hiatus, sans insolentes modifications du texte, sans transposition, sans hoquets, sans aboiements, sans chevrotements, sans intonations fausses, sans faire boiter le rhythme, sans ridicules ornements, sans nauséabondes appogiatures, de manière enfin que la période écrite par le compositeur devienne compréhensible, et reste tout simplement ce qu'il l'a faite, est un oiseau rare, très-rare, excessivement rare."

"Je ne puis m'empêcher de rendre grâces au hasard qui m'a mis dans la nécessité de parvenir à composer silencieusement et librement, en me garantissant ainsi de la tyrannie des habitudes des doigts, si dangereuses pour la pensée."

"Shakespeare, en tombant ainsi sur moi à l'improviste, me foudroya. Son éclair, en m'ouvrant le ciel de l'art avec un fracas sublime, m'en illumina les plus lointaines profondeurs. Je reconnus la vraie grandeur, la vraie beauté, la vraie vérité dramatiques."

"Vous me priez de vous dire…S'il est vrai que l'acte de foi de tout ce qui prétend aimer l'art élevé et sérieux soit celui-ci : "Il n'y a pas d'autre Dieu que Bach, et Mendelssohn est son prophète"?"

"In the period between the death of Beethoven and about 1860, the symphony without a programme might have been considered moribund, and the present (and thus the future) could have been perceived to belong to music that was explicitly poetic. Although numerous composers contributed to this trend, Berlioz has left perhaps the largest footprints in this particular geological stratum. Berlioz was perceived by the poet and critic Gautier as one of a trinity of French Romanticism, with Victor Hugo and Eugene Delacroix, but this is more an indication of his perceived stature as a major outsider than to any artistic affinity."

"One of my neighbours rises from his seat and bending towards the orchestra shouts in a voice of thunder: "You don't want two flutes there, you brutes! You want two piccolos, do you hear? Oh, the brutes!" Having said that, he simply sits down again, scowling indignantly. Amidst the general tumult produced by this outburst, I turn around and see a young man trembling with passion, his hands clenched, his eyes flashing, and a head of hair - such a head of hair. It looked like an enormous umbrella of hair, projecting something like a moveable awning over a beak of a bird of prey."

"The high forehead, precipitously overhanging the deep-set eyes, the great curving hawk-nose, the thin, finely-cut lips, the rather short chin, the enormous shock of light-brown hair against the fantastic wealth of which the barber could do nothing–whoever had seen this head would never forget it."

"La haine, c'est la colère des faibles!"

"Voyez-vous, mes enfants, quand le blé est mûr, il faut le couper; quand le vin est tiré, il faut le boire."

"Les enfants sont comme les hommes, l'expérience d'autrui ne leur sert pas."

"Méfie-toi de celui qui rit avant de parler!"

"Douleur toujours nouvelle pour celui qui souffre et qui se banalise pour l'entourage."

"Habile façon dont la mort fauche, fait ses coupes, mais seulement des coupes sombres. Les générations ne tombent pas d'un coup; ce serait trop triste, trop visible. Par bribes. Le pré attaqué de plusieurs côtés à la fois. Un jour, l'un; l'autre, quelque temps après; il faut de la réflexion, un regard autour de soi pour se rendre compte du vide fait, de la vaste tuerie contemporaine."

"Il n'est pas défendu, en littérature, de ramasser une arme rouillée; l'important est de savoir aiguiser la lame et d'en reforger la poignée à la mesure de sa main."

"C'est ça la gloire. Un bon cigare dans la bouche par le côté du feu et de la cendre."

"L'homme du Midi ne ment pas, il se trompe. Il ne dit pas toujours la vérité, mais il croit la dire."

"Le seul menteur du Midi, s'il y en a un, c'est le soleil. Tout ce qu'il touche, il l'exagère!"

"Où serait le mérite, si les héros n’avaient jamais peur?"

"L'épithète doit être la maîtresse du substantif, jamais sa femme légitime."

"Que de gens à bibliothèques sur la bibliothèque desquels on pourrait écrire: "Usage externe!" comme sur les fioles de pharmacie."

"A quinze ans, vingt ans tout au plus, on est déjà achevé d'imprimer."

"Les hommes vieillissent, mais ne mûrissent pas."

"Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid."

"Virginité, mysticisme, mélancolie, – trois mots inconnus, – trois maladies nouvelles apportées par le Christ."

"Ils sont si transparents qu'ils laissent voir votre âme."

"Le poète est ainsi dans les Landes du monde. Lorsqu'il est sans blessure, il garde son trésor. Il faut qu'il ait au cœur une entaille profonde Pour épancher ses vers, divines larmes d'or!"

"Naître, c'est seulement commencer à mourir."

"Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail."

"Tout passe. – L'art robuste Seul a l'éternité, Le buste Survit à la cité. Et la médaille austère Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Révèle un empereur."

"Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer."

"L'art pour l'art signifie, pour les adeptes, un travail dégagé de toute préoccupation autre que celle du beau en lui-même."

"Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe."

"Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme…ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière…avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie."

"The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead."

"Love is worth whatever it costs."

"For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."

"I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the “fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the “front” a writer puts on the face of reality."

"Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels — they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all."

"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."

"I never make moral judgments. All I would say is that a person was droll, or gay, or, above all, a bore. Making judgments for or against my characters bores me enormously; it doesn’t interest me at all. The only morality for a novelist is the morality of his esthétique."

"Very broadly, I think one writes and rewrites the same book. I lead a character from book to book, I continue along with the same ideas. Only the angle of vision, the method, the lighting, change."

"Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little — oh, I admit only a very little — of what life is about."

"No one, but no one, ever behaves "well" in bed unless they love or are loved — two conditions seldom fulfilled."

""One must cherish one's effigies, if one can tolerate them, perhaps more lovingly than one cherishes one's intrinsic self." That's the ABC of pride. And of humor."

"The ways of love are all the same, whether infantile, childish, sexual, tender, sadistic, erotic, or whispered. It's simply a question of understanding, of understanding oneself above all: in bed, in broad daylight, madly or not at all, in shadow, in sunlight, in despair or at table. Otherwise, it's no use. Any of it. And the little time we have left for living, while we're still alive, in other words capable of giving pleasure, and the little time we have left for thinking (or pretending to) in this vast, mindless cacophony that daily life has become, ineluctable, uncontrollable, and truly unacceptable to any civilized person, we must make absolutely certain that we share."

"Just because life is inelegant doesn't mean we have to behave likewise."

"One is never free except in relation to someone else. And when, the relation is based on happiness, it allows the greatest freedom in the world."

"Lying stimulates one's imagination and ingenuity."

"Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air."

"Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked."

"Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more."

"It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does."

"The fact that a woman you love reaches a point in the relationship where she ceases to love you, and despite that you can never bring yourself to scorn or despise her, is very rare indeed."

"Women believed in death. Without exception. It was part of their makeup. Whereas men refused to face up to it. Not only death, in fact, but life, too: a man, learning that his wife or girlfriend is pregnant, reacts like some beast of the field - "I can't believe it's true!" - while women look at the same situation as either happy news or a momentary inconvenience."

"It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones."

"We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting."

"Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern."

"I can say everything to you. It's a wonderful feeling. I never could tell Francoise that I don't really love her, that our marriage isn't based on any hones ideal. It's founded on my weariness and boredom. Although those are solid enough bases. Plenty of lasting marriages are build on them, God knows. At least, they're always present."

"She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants..."

"Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull."

"When a man has dreamed of winning something by a colossal stroke of luck, he is prone to neglect petty but more practical ways of attaining it."

"No one ever has time to examine himself honestly, and most people look no further than their neighbors' eyes, in which they may see their own reflection."

"Passion is the salt of life, and that at the times when we are under its spell this salt is indispensable to us, even if we have got along very well without it before."

"Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom."

"In love, as in finance, only the rich can get credit."

"No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love."

"Edouard was trying to understand, to find out what he could have done to lose Beatrice's favor. He couldn't know that his unpardonable sin was the fact that he was too deserving."

"Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly."

"She clearly does not enjoy being interviewed or asked to articulate in a formal way what are, to her, natural assumptions about her writing. She is sincere and helpful, but questions that are pompous or elaborate, or about personal life, or that might be interpreted as challenging her work, are liable to elicit only a simple “oui” or “non,” or “je ne sais pas— je ne sais pas du tout” — and then an amused, disconcerting smile."

"Her life was like a whirlwind... Generous, inspired, quick, rebellious, unclassifiable, inimitable... We loved Sagan, even if we had not read her books or no longer read them … Sagan was more than just Sagan, more than a writing phenomenon: a writer, a woman, an era. …She rushed through her life and her books at full speed, without ever taking herself seriously."

"She almost succeeded in inspiring the creation of the adjective 'saganesque', which one might translate as nostalgic and funny, deceptively frivolous and very lucid."

"La critique est aisée, et l'art est difficile."

"Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop."

"Les femmes ont toujours quelque arrière pensée."

"Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal."

"Ce sont là jeux de prince: On respecte un moulin: on vole une province."

"Ces malheureux rois, Dont on dit tant de mal, ont du bon quelquefois."

"Il en coûte bien cher pour mourir à Paris."

"Quand il veut, le diable fait tout bien."

"Si nous n’avions pas des juges à Berlin."

"J'aime mieux un franc ennemi Qu'un bon ami qui m'égratigne."

"Secret de Polichinelle."

"Amis, plus souvent qu’on ne croit, La tache est tout juste à l'endroit Où l'on voit briller la paillette."

"Je vais où va toute chose, Où va la feuille de rose Et lafeuille de laurier."

"La cause de notre grandeur Peut l'être aussi de notre parte."

"L’amour chez les vieillards a d'étranges racines, Et trouve, comme un lierre aux fentes des ruines, Dans ces cœurs ravagés par le temps et les maux, Cent brèches où pousser ses tenaces rameaux."

"La vérité sort mieux d’un tonneau que d'un puits."

"La patrie est aux lieux où l’on a des amis."

"Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance."

"The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes, above all mathematics where one cannot assume, as in physics, principles that are unknown to us. For there is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there... If, however, mathematics always has some essential obscurity that one cannot dissipate, it will lie, uniquely, I think, in the direction of the infinite; it is in that direction that mathematics touches on physics, on the innermost nature of bodies about which we know little."

"The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. ...Sometimes one great man gives the tone to a whole century; Descartes], to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer."

"At the time the book of Marquis de l'Hôpital had appeared, and almost all mathematicians began to turn to the new geometry of the infinite [that is, the new infinitesimal calculus], until then little known. The surprising universality of the methods, the elegant brevity of the proofs, the neatness and speed of the most difficult solutions, a singular and unexpected novelty, all attracted the mind and there was in the mathematical world a well marked revolution [une révolution bien marquée."

"Men are not willing to suffer the decision of things to be too easie, and therefore they mingle their own prejudices with truths, and so create greater perplexities than are Naturally found therein; and those scruples, which our selves frame, give us the most pain to untangle."

"It is more reasonable to remove error from truth, than to venerate error because it is mix'd with truth."

"We can never add more truth to what is true already, nor make that true which is false."

"But why then did the Ancient Priestesses always answer in Verse? ...To this Plutarch replies... That even the Ancient Priestesses did now and then speak in Prose. And besides this, in Old times all People were born Poets. ...[T]hey had no sooner drank a little freely, but they made Verses; they had no sooner cast their eyes on a Handsom Woman, but they were all Poesy, and their very common discourse fell naturally into Feet and Rhime: So that their Feasts and their Courtships were the most delectable things in the World. But now this Poetick Genius has deserted Mankind: and tho' our passions be as ardent... yet Love at present creeps in humble prose. ...Plutarch gives us another reason ...that the Ancients wrote always in Verse, whether they treated of Religion, Morality, Natural Philosophy or Astrology. Orpheus and Hesiod, whom every body acknowledges for Poets, were Philosophers also: and Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Eudoxus, and Thales... [the] Philosophers, were Poets too. It is very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose... but it is very probable... precepts... were shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred: and therefore all their Laws and their rules of Morality were in Verse. By this we may see that Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and that the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity."

"Now, the Priests who belonged to the Temples, scorn'd to use the same Customs in common with these Gypsies; for they thought themselves to be a nobler and graver sort of Fortune-tellers; which makes a mighty difference, I'll assure you, in this great affair."

"[A]bout the time of Alexander the Great, a little before Pyrrhus's days, there appear'd in Greece certain great Sects of Philosophers, such as the Peripateticks and Epicureans, who made a mock of Oracles. The Epicureans especially made sport with the paltry Poetry that came from Delphos. For the Priests hammered out their Verses as well as they could, and they often times committed faults against the common Rules of Prosodia. Now those Fleering Philosophers were mightily concerned that Apollo, the very God of Poetry, should come so far behind Homer, who was but a meer mortal, and was beholding to the same Apollo for his inspirations."

"It was to little purpose to excuse the matter, by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of Testimony that they were made by a God, who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the Beauty of a Style. For this made no impression upon the Philosophers; who, to turn this answer into ridicule, compared it to the Story of a Painter, who being hired to draw the Picture of a Horse tumbling on his Back upon the ground, drew one running full speed: and when he was told, that this was not such a Picture as was bespoke, he turned it upside down, and then ask'd if the Horse did not tumble upon his back now. Thus these Philosophers jeered such Persons, who by a way of arguing that would serve both ways, could equally prove that the Verses were made by a God, whether they were good or bad."

"So that at length the Priests of Delphos being quite baffled with the railleries of those learned Wits, renounced all Verses, at least as to the speaking them from the Tripos; for there were still some Poets maintain'd in the Temple, who at leisure turned into Verse, what the Divine fury had inspired the Pythian Priestess withal in Prose. It was very pretty, that Men could not be contented to take the Oracle just as it came piping hot from the Mouth of their God. But perhaps, when they had come a great way for it, they thought it would look silly to carry home an Oracle in Prose."

"[T]he intellectual changes of Louis XIV's reign touch the history of science—especially as they represent the extension of the scientific method into other realms of thought. ...we meet the beginnings of the criticism of the French monarchy... acute criticism from... the French intelligentsia who could claim to understand the... state better than the king himself. ...The funeral orations of Fontenelle call attention to an aspect of this movement... [i.e.,] the initial effect of the new scientific movement on political thought. ...The first result ...as Fontenelle makes clear, was the insistence that politics requires the inductive method, the collection of information, the accumulation of concrete data and statistics. ...He describes ...how Vauban... travelled over France, accumulating data, seeing the condition[s]... for himself, studying commerce and the possibilities of commerce... gaining a knowledge of local conditions. Vauban, says Fontenelle, did more than anybody else to call mathematics out of the skies... [he] put statistics to the service of modern political economy and first applied the rational and experimental method in matters of finance. ...Fontenelle tells us that ...Sir , the author of Political Arithmetic, showed how much of the knowledge requisite for government reduces itself to mathematical calculation."

"Fontenelle provides an example of the transfer of the scientific spirit, and the application of methodical doubt, in... the History of Oracles. In a sense he is one of the predursors of the comparative method in the history of religion—the collection of myths of all lands to throw light on the development of human reason. ...he recommends the study of primitive tribes in our own day ...He treats myths as... a natural product, subject to scientific analysis—not the fruits of conscious imposture but the characteristic of a certain stage in human development. The human mind he regards as... the same in all times and ages, but subject to local influences... Here is a self-conscious attempt to show how the scientific method could receive extended application and could be transferred from the examination of purely material phenomena even into... human studies."

"His wit, his Learning, his Knowledge of Mankind, his exquisite Taste in all that is Polite, the Fire of his Imagination, the uncommon Felicity of his Eloquence, and the ready Turn of his Expression, are Reasons which the Publick will think very natural to direct me in this Address to Your Lordship."

"A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues."

"Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise."

"Being is - or should be - necessary."

"When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test."

"Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it."

"I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical."

"No doubt I shall be told: "In the immense majority of cases this is an illusion." But it is of the essence of hope to exlclude the consideration of cases; moreover, it can be shown that there exists an ascedning dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof - the plane of salvation as opposed to that of success in whatever form"

"the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope."

"The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation."

"speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride."

"And yet it is clear that the normal development of a human being implies an increasingly precise and, as it were, automatic division between what concerns him and what does not, between things for which he is responsible and those for which he is not. Each one of us becomes the centre of a sort of mental space arranged in concentric zones of decreasing interest and participat ion. It is as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him; and this sclerosis is bound up with the hardening of the categories in accordance with which we conceive and evaluate the world."

"The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction."

"No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis. But it is with this crisis in our moral awareness as a starting-point, that there becomes possible that cry from us towards the creative principle, and that demand by it on us, which each must answer in his own way."

"The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. ... I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time."

"No philosopher would be willing to accept the idea of philosophy as a way of escape, but might there not be a question of the philosopher being in duty bound to refuse to accept a world, like our real world here, of disorder and crime where the values of the mind and spirit can no longer find a home?"

"There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought."

"We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect."

"We ought to be able to see more clearly just for what reason the mass-man is so easily turned into a fanatic. What I seem to myself to have grasped is this, that such permeability is due to the fact that man, that the individual, in order to belong to the mass, to be a mass-man, has had, as a preliminary, though without having had the least awareness of it, to divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality or rather to the fact of his belonging to a small actual group. The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas and images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment."

"The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear."

"It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse."

"There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocalizing process. … The human creature under normal conditions finds his bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are not only close to him in space but also linked to him by a feeling of intimacy. Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constellation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions assembles itself around each human being. … This kind of constellation around the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of dissolution."

"I spent the first ten years of my life in Germany, the following ten in Paris, the following ten between Argentine and Uruguay."

"We are too many to live, but never enough to suffer and die."

"We are all guilty of existing; Gnosis admits that life is a burden and that the salvation of the species lies in chastity, resulting in universal extinction. Jesus — the real Jesus, not the one of the Catholic Church — expressed a similar sentiment when, as some fragments of the Apocryphal Gospels show, he wished that life would cease in order for misery to end, and that he praised a woman named Salome for being sterile, declaring to her that he came for destroying the opera of the women. These are a couple of rational statements that every reasonable man should adopt, but since the majority is neither reasonable nor sensible, new abortions will be raised in misery, shame, disease, and filth."

"Death is not terrible, life is terrible, but we see things literally and figuratively upside down. The philosopher is the one who puts everything back in its proper place."

"If the fornicators sin, those who impregnate sin a hundred times more."

"The fact that we suffer doesn't necessarily imply that pain is meaningful; quite the contrary! It's always pointless to endure pain, but our vanity refuses to admit it, and therefore builds castles in the air to amuse itself with illusions, which is also called metaphysics."

"Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it's a luxury of the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common man."

"Every child believes in its parents: that seems to be the first mistake, for they are usually not gods but ordinary people, and a child will never reach manhood unless it sees through this deception. The free man must be unfaithful to his roots; otherwise, he becomes a servant."

"I would be pleased indeed, if the universe were full of blazing ovens, concentration camps, and people deported."

"My entire existence is a methodical "NO”."

"Who are the most wicked of men? It's the optimists."

"For me, nothingness has a charm that the abortions that populate this place could never have and never will have. I thank heaven that I live here; leaving this world doesn't take any effort."

"If I had to live my life over again, I wouldn't change a thing. I fully approve of what I've done, and I'm immensely proud of myself. It's life itself that I despise, not my existence; it's the principle, not its application, that couldn't have been better, given the circumstances."

"It's because life itself is inhuman that men are not human."

"According to Gnosis, the universe is the prison of the species and is virtually embraced by fate, which is reminiscent of Sartre despite all the differences in expression. We enter the world through a gate that requires no explanation: we are the outcasts of women. We emerge from the womb and are thrust into something we didn't choose, which is essentially Heidegger's concept of thrownness. Our mothers cast us into the world, and we awaken as prisoners. When our eyes open, we find ourselves in chains. Our existence is like Plato's cave, where we perceive only the shadows of things."

"French, German, English and Spanish are four admirable languages and I manage to express myself in all of them with more or less skill."

"I don't hide my profession of pessimism and I'm an avowed partisan of reaction."

"The educated reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening to a fugue in four voices."

"I was born to myself between 1946 and 1948, I then opened my eyes on the world, until that moment I have been blind."

"Imagine a world in which thirty billion humans would live like the people in Asia, cramped into a few cities the size of France, with hundred-story buildings containing a hundred thousand rooms, where water runs for only two hours a day. Most of them would be born, live, and die in ten-unit structures, breathing air supplied by machines and consuming rather unappetizing food made of algae, cellulose, or even insects. Is it any wonder that some feel the urge to destroy everything, if only to avoid a nightmare that has now become inevitable?"

"Happiness rarely leads us to intellectual adventures. Writers and artists, not to mention philosophers, are usually dissatisfied with themselves or the world."

"The older I grow, the more Gnosis speaks to my reason: the world is not ruled by a Providence, it's intrinsically evil and deeply absurd, and Creation is either the dream of blind intelligence or the game of a principle without a moral."

"The few truths contained in the so-called Catholic faith lead us back to Gnosticism, which is a precise description of universal misery and absurdity, literally doubling its weight with death. In the light of Gnosis, we rediscover in Existentialism the abandonment and confinement of man: he is left alone, chained, and walks among the crowd under the closed vault of destiny, prey to loneliness and finitude. He discovers that he did not choose the suffering he has to endure, that he was just there, nothing else, and that he cannot transcend this situation since it is part of his essence."

"In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holiness being absolute hellishness. That's why our Saviors are of no avail, their remedies being too strong for the common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner."

"Great heed has to be taken about the fact that most of us desire to remain unconscious: felicity (in eyes of common man) is rapture and rapture seems a quenching of awareness reduced to the awareness of its obliteration... Sex and Religion are centred on it both and I dare say that their convenience will in future be to join instead of rivalling, as they are wont to do, obscenity will be religious as it was long ago."

"Our moral ideas are not transcendent, our moral ideas are historical and History obeys to changing Aions, we feel that ours is fading and no authority can enforce confidence rooted in what no power includes : in Sensibility itself. To every Aion a new Sensibility adheres and to each Sensibility another Aion is related, sin is nowhere, we only see abuse and worst among abuses, the delusion of sin as such."

"Most of us live betwixt quiet despair and furious nihilism."

"I am a racist and a colonialist."

"Our most terrifying fears and our innermost secret desires for extermination are reflected in this elegant and profound book, without any sort of leniency to attenuate the disgust and hopelessness we feel when faced with a humanity constantly atrophied by a series of values and practices that lead to chaos."

"We strive towards death like an arrow towards its target, and we never miss. Death is our only certainty, and we always know that we will die, no matter where, when, or how. The idea of eternal life is nonsense, eternity is not life, death is the rest we seek, life and death are intertwined, and those who demand something else ask for the impossible and will earn nothing but smoke."

"We, who are not satisfied with empty words, consent to disappear, and we rejoice in our fate. We didn't choose to be born, and consider ourselves fortunate to have nowhere to outlive this life, which was imposed upon us rather than given — a life full of sorrows and pains with dubious or harmful pleasures."

"The cities we inhabit are schools of death because they are inhuman. Each has become a den of noise and stench. Each has become a chaos of buildings where we amass ourselves by the millions, losing our life's purpose. Unfortunates, with no escape, we feel that we have put ourselves, willingly or not, in the labyrinth of the absurd, from which we will only emerge dead, for our destiny is to multiply without end, only to perish in great numbers. With each turn of the wheel, the cities we inhabit advance imperceptibly towards each other, aspiring to merge into an absolute chaos of noise and stench. With each turn of the wheel, the price of land rises, and in the labyrinth that devours free space, the revenue from investments builds hundreds of walls, day after day. Since money must work and the cities we inhabit must progress, it's still legitimate for their houses to double in height with each generation, even if they lack water every two days. The builders only seek to escape the fate they are preparing for us by fleeing to the countryside."

"Since order is not infallible, it is up to war to one day remedy its faults, and as order continues to multiply them, we are heading towards war; war and the future seem inseparable. This is the only certainty: death is, in a word, the meaning of everything, and man is but a thing in the face of death, as are nations. History is a passion, and its victims are legion. The world we live in is hell moderated by nothingness, where man, refusing to know himself, prefers to sacrifice himself like an animal species that has become too numerous - similar to swarms of locusts and armies of rats - believing that it is more sublime to perish, to perish innumerable times, than to finally reconsider the world he inhabits."

"We live for death, love for death, and give birth and toil for death. Our works and days now follow one another in the shadow of death. The discipline we adhere to, the values we uphold, and the plans we make all lead to one end: death."

"Evil desires men to multiply, for the more men there are, the less they are worth. To be truly human, man will never be rare enough."

"Life is no longer sacred from the moment the living become too numerous. The lives of surplus men are no more valuable than those of insects, and soldiers killed in war are no different in the eyes of those who command them."

"Le malheur de l'égalité, c'est que nous ne la voulons qu'avec nos supérieurs."

"Lesbians are not women."

"I have heard much of these languishing lovers, but I never yet saw one of them die for love."

"To me it seems much better to love a woman as a woman, than to make her one's idol, as many do. For my part, I am convinced that it is better to use than to abuse."

"No one ever perfectly loved God who did not perfectly love some of his creatures in this world."

"Un malheureux cherche l'autre."

"He who knows his own incapacity, knows something, after all."

"Man is wise ... when he recognises no greater enemy than himself."

"God always helps madmen, lovers, and drunkards."

"Mariage est un état de si longue durée, qu'il ne doit être commencé légèrement, ne sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents."

"When one has one good day in the year, one is not wholly unfortunate."

"Blessed, unquestionably, is he who has it in his power to do evil, yet does it not."

"Though jealousy be produced by love as ashes are by fire, yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother the flame."

"I never knew a mocker who was not mocked, ... a deceiver who was not deceived, or a proud man who was not humbled."

"Ilz font semblant de n'aymer poinct les raisins quand ilz sont si haults, qu'ilz ne les peuvent cueillir."

"Some there are who are much more ashamed of confessing a sin than of committing it."

"The less one sees and knows men, the higher one esteems them; for experience teaches their real value."

"There are few husbands whom the wife can not win in the long run by patience and love, unless they are harder than the rocks which the soft water penetrates in time."

"The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is."

"We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more comformable to our own natures: fools love folly, and wise men wisdom."

"There is no greater fool than he who thinks himself wise; no one wiser than he who suspects he is a fool."

"There is in us more of the appearance of sense and of virtue than of the reality."

"The virtuous action, done for virtue's sake alone, is truly laudable."

"Men are so accustomed to lie, that one can not take too many precautions before trusting them — if they are to be trusted at all."

"Love works miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favoring the passions, destroying reason, and, in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy."

"He who knows his incapacity, knows something."

"The woman who does not choose to love should cut the matter short at once, by holding out no hopes to her suitor."

"Extreme concupiscence may be found under an extreme austerity."

"Hypocrites are wicked: they hide their defects with so much care, that their hearts are poisoned by them."

"We shall all be perfectly virtuous when there is no longer any flesh on our bones."

"I confess I should be glad if my pleasures were as pleasing to God as they are to me: in that case, I should often find matter for rejoicing."

"It is difficult to repent of what gives us pleasure."

"No one perfectly loves God who does not perfectly love some of his creatures."

"In love, as in war, a fortress that parleys is half taken."

"Pleasures are sins: we regret to offend God; but, then, pleasures please us."

"The true and the false speak the same language."

"A woman of honor should never suspect another of things she would not do herself."

"Since love teaches how to trick the tricksters, how much reason have we to fear it — we who are poor simple creatures!"

"Many weep for the sin, while they laugh over the pleasure."

"There are women so hard to please that it seems as if nothing less than an angel will suit them: hence it comes that they often meet with devils."

"God has put into the heart of man love and the boldness to sue, and into the heart of woman fear and the courage to refuse."

"Love is a disease that kills nobody, but one whose time has come."

"The principal themes of the [Heptaméron] are rape, seductions bordering on rape, incest and numerous infringements of the sex and marriage codes of aristocratic Europe."

"The first modern woman."

"My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair."

"Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear."

"What, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies."

"First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it."

"What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa."

"What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment."

"Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out."

"It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart."

"Khrushchev’s revelations concerning Stalin are enough to have plunged all those who have participated in communist activity, to whatever degree, into an abyss of shock, pain, and shame (or, at least, I hope so).The dead, the tortured, the executed—no, neither posthumous rehabilitations, nor national funerals, nor official speeches can overcome them. These are not the kind of ghosts that one can ward off with a mechanical phrase.From now on, they will show up as watermarks in the very substance of the system."

"The details supplied by Khrushchev on Stalin’s methods ... lead us to believe in the existence in these countries of a veritable state capitalism, exploiting the working class in a manner not very different from the way the working class is used in capitalist countries."

"With the exception of Yugoslavia, in numerous European countries—in the name of socialism—usurping bureaucracies that are cut off from the people (bureaucracies from which it is now proven that nothing can be expected) have achieved the pitiable wonder of transforming into a nightmare what humanity has for so long cherished as a dream: socialism."

"I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism."

"Weakness always has a thousand means and cowardice is all that keeps us from listing them."

"Every time you summon me it reminds me of a basic fact, the fact that you've stolen everything from me, even my identity!"

"It is under these circumstances that, apropos of buying a ribbon for my daughter, I happened to leaf through a periodical on display in the haberdashery where the ribbon was sold. It was, under an extremely unpretentious cover, the first issue of a review called Tropiques which had just come out in Fort-de-France. Needless to say, knowing the extent to which ideas had been debased in the last year and not unfamiliar with the lack of scruples characteristic of police reactions in Martinique, I approached this periodical with extreme diffidence. ... I could not believe my eyes: for what was said there was what had to be said and was said in a manner not only as elegantly but elevatedly as anyone could say it! All the grimacing shadows were apart, scattered; all the lies, all the mockery shredded: thus the voice of man was in no way broken, suppressed—it sprang upright again like the very spike of light. Aimé Césaire, such was the name of the one who spoke."

"At most, critics are permitted to say something about the conflicting aspects of the formation of the personality in question and to bring out the striking circumstances of that formation. Unquestionably in Césaire's case it would for once lead us, at full gallop, away from the path of indifference."

"Not surprisingly, a valorization of the body has been present in nearly all the literature of "second wave" 20th-century feminism, as it has characterized the literature produced by the anti-colonial revolt and by the descendants of the enslaved Africans. On this ground, across great geographic and cultural boundaries, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) anticipates Aimé Cesaire's Return to the Native Land (1938), when she mockingly scolds her female audience and, behind it, a broader female world, for not having managed to produce anything but children."

"As Cedric Robinson argued, a group of radical black intellectuals including W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox, and others, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western civilization itself."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all."

"In an essay on the Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, Clayton Eshleman names this hunger as "the desire, the need, for a more profound and ensouled world." There is a continuing dynamic between art repressed and art reborn, between the relentless marketing of the superficial and the "spectral and vivid reality that employs all means" (Rukeyser again) to reach through armoring, resistances, resignation, to recall us to desire."

"For the main leaders in the colonized world in the 1950s and ’60s, the issue was not promises of future integration but decolonization and anticolonial solidarity. The issue of race was essential. Colonialism was in its essence a racist project, and the lack of US support for full decolonization reminded many Third World leaders of racial oppression against African-Americans in the United States. But the European Left was also to blame. In his 1956 resignation from the PCF, whom he had been elected to represent in the National Assembly ten years earlier, the black Martinican writer Aimé Césaire castigated the Eurafrique idea: “Look at the great breath of unity passing over all the black countries! Look how, here and there, the torn fabric is being re-stitched! Experience, harshly acquired experience, has taught us that we have at our disposal but one weapon, one sole efficient and undamaged weapon: the weapon of unity, the weapon of the anticolonial rallying of all who are willing, and the time during which we are dispersed according to the fissures of the metropolitan parties is also the time of our weakness and defeat.”"

"The reason why Absurdists plays take place in No Man's Land with only two characters in primarily financial."

"Article 1. Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility."

"Marriage is a tomb of trust and love. The married woman can with impunity give bastards to her husband, and also give them the wealth which does not belong to them. The woman who is unmarried has only one feeble right; ancient and inhuman laws refuse to her for her children the impossibility on my part to try to give my sex an honorable and just consistency, I leave it to men to attain glory for dealing with this matter; but while we wait, the way can be prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions."

"Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question, you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign over empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?"

"Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it."

"Le bonheur écrit à l'encre blanche sur des pages blanches."

"Rien ne manque à sa gloire, il manquait à la nôtre."

"La loi permet souvent ce que défend l’honneur."

"Qu’une nuit paraît longue à la douleur qui veille!"

"La loi de l'univers, c'est malheur aux vaincus!"

"Des états la sombre origine, Les progrès, l’éclat, la ruine Repassent encore sous nos yeux; Et, présens à tout, nous y sommes Contemporains de tous les horames, Et citoyens de tous les lieux."

"L'instant de notre naissance Fut pour nous un arrêt de mort."

"The moment of our birth Did on us the death sentence pass."

"Le Besoin, père de l'Adresse."

"(Partout l'œeil surpris admire) Un désordre plein de beauté."

"Tout est dit, tout devient commun. Les Conquérans voudroient un nouveau monde; C'est aux Rimeurs qu'il en faut un."

"La Providence est la commune mère. Fiez-vous-y: mais ne la tentez pas."

"Eh! sot! que n'attends-tu, pour les accommoder, Que les gens sont las de se battre?"

"Dès qu'on est homme il faut faillir."

"(Donnez le même esprit aux hommes; Vous ôtez tout le sel de la société.) L’Ennui nâcquit un jour de l’Uniformité."

"La Haine veille et I'Amitié s'endort."

"Le cœur des malheureux n'est qu'un trop sûr oracle."

"II faut un terms au crime, et non à la vengeance."

"Ainsi que le heros brille par ses exploits, La grandeur des bienfaits doit signaler les rois."

"Le crime est toujours crime, et jamais la beauté N'a pu servir de voile à sa difformité."

"Je connais la fureur de tes soupçons jaloux, Mais j'ai trop de vertu pour craindre mon époux."

"A la cour d’un tyran, injuste ou légitime, Le plus léger soupçon tint toujours lieu de crime; Et cest être proscrit que d’être soupçonné."

"On n'est point criminel pour être ambitieux."

"La crainte fit les dieux, l'audace a fait les rois."

"La parole des rois n'est plus qu'une ombre vaine."

"L'innocence a toujours confondu l'imposture."

"Aucun fiel n’a jamais empoisonné ma plume."

"Quoi qu’en dise Aristote et sa docte cabale, Le tabac est divin, il n’est rien qui n’égale."

"Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, Il faut aimer ce que l'on a."

"A quoy me sert la vie en butte à la fortune? II vaut mieux, il vaut mieux en arrester le cours, Et mourir une fois que mourir tons les jours."

"Je sens l'impatience en mon âme accroistre De cognoistre le mal que j'ay peur de cognoistre."

"Ne croy pas en automne Cueillir les fruits de l'amour."

"On ne peut trop tost ny trop tard Gouster les plaisirs de la vie."

"Plus on est élevé, plus on court de dangers; Les grands pins sont en butte aux coups de la tempeste Et la rage des vents brise plutôt la faiste Des maisons de nos roys, que les toits des bergers."

"Rien au monde ne dure Qu'un eternel changement."

"Et vous, eaux qui dormez sur des lits de pavots, Vous qui toujours suivez vous-mêmes fugitives..."

"Tircis, il faut penser à faire la retraite; La course de nos jours est plus qu’à demi faite; L’âge insensiblement nous conduit à la mort; ... Il est temps de jouir des délices du port."

"Les lois de la mort sont fatales Aussi bien aux maisons royales Qu'aux taudis converts de roseaux; Tous nos jours sont sujets aux Parques; Ceux des bergers et des monarques Sont coupds des memes ciseaux."

"Sans un peu de folie On ne rime plus à trente ans."

"Trouver la mélancolie Dans le sein de la volupté."

"L'esprit n'est jamais las d'écrire, Lorsque le cœur est de moitié."

"La douleur est un siècle, et la mort un moment."

"Les maîtres cependant sont des gens bien heureux, Que souvent nous ayons le sens commun pour eux."

"Dans mainte auteur de science profonde J'ai lu que l'on perd à trop courir le monde; Très rarement en devient-on meilleur: Un sort errant ne conduit qu'à l'erreur."

"Ah! qu'un grand nom est un bien dangereux: Un sort caché fut toujours plus heureux."

"Désir de fille est un feu qui dévore; Désir de nonne est cent fois pis encore."

"Les sots sont ici-bas pour nos menus plaisirs."

"Ce n'est pas sur leurs moeurs que je veux qu'on en cause, Un vice, un déshonneur, font assez peu de chose; Tout cela dans le monde est oublié bientôt; Un ridicule reste, et c'est ce qu'il leur faut."

"Tout ce qui vit n'est fait que pour nous réjouir, Et se moquer du monde est tout l'art d'en jouir."

"La faute en est aux dieux qui la firent si bête."

"Mais Paris guérit tout et les absents ont tort."

"Un bien qu'on doit avoir est comme un bien qu'on a."

"C'est des premiers pas que dépend la carrière."

"Elle a d'assez beaux yeux Pour des yeux de province."

"L'aigle d'une maison n'est qu'un sot dans une autre."

"Tout est mal, tout est bien, tout le monde est content."

"L'esprit qu’on veut avoir gâte celui qu’on a."

"Un rapport clandestin n'est pas d'un honnête homme; Quand j'accuse quelqu'un, je le dois, et me nomme."

"J'aime la mer, mais que d'eau... que d'eau!..."

"I love the sea, but so much water... so much water!..."

"Politesse et bonne humeur avec tout le monde, et respect aux femmes de chambre..."

"Un égoïste est quelqu'un qui ne pense pas à moi."

"Le cœur de l'homme est un grand fripon!"

"La victoire me suit, et tout suit la victoire."

"Et vaincre sans péril serait vaincre sans gloire."

"Si la mode empoisonne un natural heureux, A quoi sert le bonheur d'être né vertueux."

"L'amour pardonne tout."

"Un suisse, comme un sot, fait toujours son métier."

"Quand tout le monde a tort, tout le monde a raison."

"En exagérant tout, on ne définit rien."

"C'est dans les grands dangers qu'on voit les grands courages."

"Près du sexe tu vins, tu vis, et tu vainquis: Que ton sort est heureux! Allons, saute Marquis!"

"C'est posséder les biens que savoir s'en passer."

"Qu’un joueur est heureux! sa poche est un trésor! Sous ses heureuses mains le cuivre devient or."

"On aime sans raison et sans raison l'on hait."

"Hippocrate dit oui, mais Galien dit non."

"Cette femme a fait comme Troie: De braves gens sans aucun fruit Furent dix ans à cette proie Un cheval n'y fut qu'une nuit."

"Du choc des sentiments et des opinions La vérité jaillit et s'échappe en rayons."

"Le Peintre n'avoit point, sous un voile jaloux, De la belle Pandore enseveli les charmes: L'innocence étoit nue et l'étoit sans alarmes. Elle s'enveloppoit de sa seule pudeur."

"Expliquera, morbleu! les femmes qui pourra!"

"Those who always speak well of women do not know them sufficiently; those who always speak ill of them do not know them at all."

"Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t'aime davantage, Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain."

"All women are, in some degree, poets in imagination, angels in hearts, and diplomatists in mind."

"Dis, cher aimé! Veux-tu venir vers ces pays où passent les caravanes, à l'ombre des palmiers de Kachmyr ou de Mysore? Veux-tu venir au Bengale choisir, dans les bazars, des roses, des étoffes et des filles d'Arménie, blanches comme le pelage des hermines? Veux-tu lever des armées soulever le nord de l'Iran, comme un jeune Cyaxare? Ou, plutôt, si nous appareillions pour Ceylan, où sont les blancs éléphants aux tours vermeilles, les aras de feu dans les feuillages, et d'en-soleillées demeures où tombent les pluies des jets d'eau dans les cours de marbre? [...] Quel plaisir d'attacher nos patins d'acier sur les routes de la pâle Suède! ou vers Christiania, dans les sentiers et les fjords éclatants des monts de la Norvège!"

"La Terre, dis-tu? Qu'a-t-elle donc jamais réalisé, cette goutte de fange glacée, dont l'Heure ne sait que mentir au milieu du ciel?"

"Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous."

"At twenty, man is less a lover of woman than of women: he is more in love with the sex than with the individual, however charming she may be."

"The life of a woman is a long dissimulation. Candor, beauty, freshness, virginity, modesty — a woman has each of these but once. When lost, she must simulate them the rest of her life."

"The ear is the last resort of chastity: after it is expelled from the heart, it takes refuge there."

"A secret passion defends the heart of a woman better than her moral sense."

"The heart of youth is reached through the senses; the senses of age are reached through the heart."

"Restif de la Bretonne undoubtedly holds a remarkable place in French literature. He was inordinately vain, of extremely relaxed morals, and perhaps not entirely sane. His books were written with haste, and their licence of subject and language renders them quite unfit for general perusal."

"The King, with whom I had this Discourse, was so affected with the Truth of it, that, You are in the right, said he to me; and ’tis with very great Justice that one of our Poets has elegantly compar’d all kind of Men to the Pieces, wherewith we play at Chess: Some act the Kings, the Queens, the Knights, the Fools, and simple Pawns. There is a vast Difference between them, while they are in Motion; but when once the Game is over, and the Chess-board shut, they are thrown promiscuously together into the same Box, without any manner of Distinction. Death does the very same thing: Kings, Emperors, Merchants, Slaves, Warriors, Men of the Robe, and of the Revenue, all then become equal; and there is nothing but our good Deeds and Charity towards our Neighbours, that will give us one Day a Superiority above others."

"Ce temps, si court, a des langueurs mortelles Quand l'âme oisive en compte les instans: C'est le travail qui lui donne des ailes."

"Dans les espaces immenses de l'erreur, la vérité n'est qu'un point. Qui l'a saisi, ce point unique?"

"Il n'est pas permis à tous les hommes d'être grands, mais ils peuvent tous être bons."

"L'éloquence est dans l'âme, et non dans la parole."

"Le ciel, l'enfer sont dans le cœur de l'homme."

"Où peut-on être mieux Qu'au sein de sa famille?"

"En général le ridicule touche au sublime, et pour marcher sur la limite qui les sépare, sans la passer jamais, il faut bien prendre garde à soi."

"Quand on n'a pas ce que l'on aime, il faut aimer ce que l'on a."

"En général le ridicule touche au sublime."

"Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve."

"Les hommes font les lois. Les femmes font les mœurs."

"The standing armies, while a burden on the people, are inadequate for the achievement of great and decisive results in war, and meanwhile the mass of the people, untrained in arms, degenerates....The hegemony over Europe will fall to that nation which...becomes possessed of manly virtues and creates a national army."