An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.

A woman who cannot be ugly is not beautiful.

Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.

Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.

Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

When a man is treated like a beast, he says, 'After all, I'm human.' When he behaves like a beast, he says 'After all, I'm only human.'

I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.

Justice is a whore that won't let herself be stiffed, and collects the wages of shame even from the poor.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.

Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.

I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

You would be surprised how hard it often is to translate an action into thought.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.

Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.

It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.