Women forge themselves the chains with which men do not wish to burden them.
Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them; for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes.
The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness.
All man's misfortune consists in this one thing, his inability to remain quietly in one room.
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal.
And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.
Men are not only prone to forget benefits and injuries; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
A useless life is an early death.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
A good reputation is more valuable than money.
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it.
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
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