Those men who live with the greatest intensity are often the ones who seem to take least interest in life.
To have a solid foundation of skepticism,—that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
Learning for learning's sake is perhaps as coarse as eating for eating's sake.
It is a singular thing: in literature, when the form is not new, neither is the content.
Man is an animal that "arrived"; that is all.
It was an accident that endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.
Sexual modesty is an advance over the exhibitionism of monkeys.
Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.
Nothing so softens the obduracy of chaste hearts as the certainty of secrecy.
The notion that the dead are not dead assumes, in the crowd, comical forms. I read in a novel (1901): "Madeleine read the letter over again. M. Piot was dead, the poor man! How cold he must be in that north wind!" Men are stupid.