When there is nothing to fear is the time to begin fearing everything.

We say of an animal that it is intelligent, and we say the same thing of a woman; but in neither case is it usually appropriate, clearly for very different reasons.

To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.

Better than succeeding little by little is failing at one go.

The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.

The first condition for making music is not to make a noise.

If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.

To be ready to fail is to be prepared for success.

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

To be thirsty and to drink water is the perfection of sensuality rarely achieved. Sometimes you drink water; other times you are thirsty.

Only one thing has to matter for everything to matter.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

You can say the opposite of something you've said but you can't do the opposite of something you've done.

Pride in a man is confused with dignity; in a woman, with self-love.

Sensuality without love is a sin; love without sensuality is worse than a sin.

To sin offers repentance and forgiveness; not to sin offers only punishment.

An ignorance of Marx is as frequent among Marxists as an ignorance of Christ is among Catholics.

Theology is the logic of the Devil.

True art tries not to attract attention in order to be noticed.

You can hesitate before deciding, but not once the decision is made.

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.

In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo.

The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.

It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime.

There are no good or bad habits. All habits are, by definition, bad.

Happiness is always a coincidence.

True solidarity is only possible among the solitary.

Do we have to talk in order to agree or agree in order to talk?

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

The man who spends all his time looking up to heaven is not always the best; in fact, he is usually the worst.

Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.

Man is a question; woman is an answer. The mistake women make today is to offer themselves as answers before being questioned.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

When there is nothing to fear is the time to begin fearing everything.

There are no good or bad habits. All habits are by definition bad.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief it is a superstition.

Tradition simply means that we need to end what began well and continue what is worth continuing

A rocket is an experiment; a star is an observation.

A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.

Theology is the logic of the devil.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.