We should remember that it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes or barbarities of remote ages.

When dealing with the insane, it is best to pretend to be sane.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Solitude is independence.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money, by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

Obeying is like eating and drinking. There's nothing like it if you've been without it too long.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul, never.

Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.

All the girls I had ever loved were mine. each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.