"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."

"See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation."

"Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous."

"Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities."

"Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends."

"He who is affected by an insult is infected by it."

"Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail."

"Be helpful, even if it compromises you."

"Find first, seek later."

"One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet."

"Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind."

"Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection."

"People would say to Al Brown: "You are not a boxer. You are a dancer." He laughed at this, and won."

"Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally."

"Respect movements, flee schools."

"It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."

"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."

"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 a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."

"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."

"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."

"Life is a horizontal fall."

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

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

"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."

"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."

"Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you."

"We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel."

"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them."

"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas ."

"The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness."

"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."

"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator."

"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."

"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."

"Art is science made clear."

"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."

"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."

"The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."

"Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images."

"The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches."

"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."

"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."

"Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."