A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

At times I think and at times I am.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Politeness is organized indifference.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Love is being stupid together.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

Every beginning is a consequence every beginning ends some thing.

God created man and finding him not sufficiently alone gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

The purpose of psychology is to give us wholly novel ideas about the things that we know best.

To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.