All Quotes

"Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?"

"Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking."

"Wisdom is the strength of the weak."

"The good is worth more than the best."

"Here is the desert. In this silence, everything speaks to me: and in your noise, everything falls silent."

"The number of books is infinite."

"They cannot accustom themselves to lacking nothing."

"The people. They know how to know, but not how to choose."

"The mind can only create errors. Truths are not created, they exist; one can only see them, disentangle them, discover them, and expose them."

"Democracy and slavery are inseparable. Why. Democracy as it existed among the ancients was no more than government by a number of men large enough to be called the people. But this designation is false. The true people, in such a state, the greatest number, the majority belong to the class of slaves, and slavery inevitably develops in a country governed this way, because it is impossible that those who spend their time making laws can make shoes and clothes, plant crops, work fields, etc."

"They do not know how to apply names to things."

"What our eyes see, our imagination can no longer see. The same thing cannot be the object of both kinds of seeing."

"The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye."

"When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others."

"God made life to be lived and not to be known."

"Imprisoned in our bodies...and our soul has its windows."

"Don't cut what you can untie."

"All these philosophers are no more than surgeons."

"The weakness of the dying slanders life."

"The staircase that leads to God. What does it matter if it is make-believe, if we really climb it? What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is made of marble or word, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to those who do not climb it."

"What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly."

"To hide our eyes to make others believe we are hiding tears."

"The truth. They make it consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forth incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a liberation from error."

"Stars more beautiful to the eyes than the telescope that robs them of their illusions."

"To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our minds of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing the work. It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depends on enthusiasm and imagination. Such a plan is itself a half-work. It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves. We must say it cannont be finished. In fact, it must not be for a very good reason: it is impossible. We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all others on the hand. This is suitable and even very useful for painters, for sculptors. Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for their minds. Forms and colors, which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work. But the orator, the poet, and the philosopher will not find the same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought. Everything is one for them. Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say. A plan, however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must have above all the notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work. That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives. The first word must give the color, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, and the proportions."

"It is impossible to love the same person twice."

"To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think. Everything we think must be thought with our entire being, body, and soul."

"Memory. — It is a mirror, that retains, and retains forever. Nothing is lost in it, nothing is erased. But it can be tarnished. And then one sees nothing in it."

"Illusion or play. Everything agreeable is in them."

"Adventurous minds, which wait for and receive their ideas only from chance."

"My soul lives in a place where the passions have passed by and where I have known them all."

"Let us remember that everything is double."

"Everything is game except what makes the soul better or worse."

"We are worth more when someone looks at us. And, because of this, an eye is always watching us."

"It is impossible for me to say something foolish without being aware of it."

"Solitude gives an I. I that gives solitude. It is in our thoughts, and the one the world gives, in our feelings. Because solitude grows accustomed to seeing, to contemplating; and the world, to acting for itself."

"Pride swells the brain. Vanity carries with it smoke, minds. Hatred tightens the heart. Love warms the lungs. Admiration stops the heart. We breathe through desire. We want to pump up all that delights, and dilates. Sadness is inaction. The love that comes from the blood, the love that comes from the soul."

"To speak with his imagination, but to think with his reason."

"The things we know when not thinking of them."

"Where do ideas go? They go into the memory of God."

"Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms; or, if you like, it blossoms from the word that presents it and clothes it."

"Thoughts that cannot survive the open air and that evaporate as soon as we take them out of the room. To put them to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where you found them, they do not endure."

"To know: it is to see inside oneself."

"Perhaps (and probably) it would be true to say that we cannot conceive of anything except what we can see in our minds."

"It is very difficult to be wise (through the mind); it is not difficult to be wise occasionally and by chance, but it is difficult to be wise assiduously and by choice."

"Close your eyes and you will see."

"Objects must be described only in order to describe the feelings they envoke in us."

"I have not seen you since, but you have often appeared to me in my dreams."

"The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California."

"There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln."