"The hordes of words that fill our books proclaim our ignorance, reveal the obscurities that flood our knowledge. If we were perfectly enlightened, our moral books would contain only maxims and our books on physics and spirituality would contain only axioms and facts. Everything else is clutter and shows no more than our gropings, our efforts, and our difficulties."

"He must not cultivate his friends, but cultivate his friendships within himself. They must be kept, cared for, watered."

"We always lose the friendship of those who lose our esteem."

"Reason leads man back to his instincts."

"Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings. (Whoever has no constant opinions has no constant emotions.)"

"There is an infinity of things one does well only through necessity."

"The talkative person is one who speaks more than he thinks. Someone who thinks a great deal and talks a great deal is never considered a talkative person. The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart."

"Let's go; and follow your mistake."

"Anger, which purges resentment."

"To let the reader complete the symmetry between words and do no more than suggest it."

"In this painting of our life given to us by our memories, everything is moving and depends on our point of view."

"Never the mind without the soul."

"Having found nothing worth more than emptiness, he leaves space vacant."

"When I had the strength, I did not have the patience. I have the patience today and I no longer have the power."

"Fortunately, when he lacks reason he also lacks words."

"Let anger pass, make a place for it; do not impede its progress; do not disturb its development, give it the time it needs to die out, open a wide path for it."

"There are words agreeable to the eye (in the same way there are words agreeable to the ear). By a fortunate combination of the letters that form them or by the harmony of these letters. For each letter has its shape."

"In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy."

"What is clear should not be drawn out too much. These useless explanations, these endless examinations are a kind of long whiteness and lead to boredom. It is the uniformity of a wall, of a long piece of laundry."

"In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks himself of nothing knows nothing."

"Logic works, metaphysics contemplates."

"To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it."

"Half myself mocks the other half."

"A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: "old men want to survive.""

"You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you. But the facts that are not known to you? What do they say?"

"Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees."

"Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm."

"Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities."

"Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea by in any way treated as a thing."

"There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just like there is nothing perfectly round."

"Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war."

"Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered."

"Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself."

"You go to truth by way of poetry and I go to poetry by way of truth."

"To write his views or his observations, his ideas, but not his judgments. Our judgments limit our views of things. Some enclosures, but no walls. The man who always write his judgments places before his eyes the calpe and abyla. He goes no further and creates a nec plus ultra. Thus, in the study of wisdom, many views and few judgments."

"When we find what we have been looking for, we don't have time to say it. We must die."

"One must die lovable (if one can)."

"Reason does not reason. It goes straight to the fact or the consequence."

"When a truth is better conceived through abstraction, use the abstraction; if not, don't."

"Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision."

"It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light."

"Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing."

"In such times, if you want neither to lie nor to wound, you are reduced to being silent."

"Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name."