Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began

Well to be fair, I said, I mean she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.

Someone once said that nostalgia is longing for a place you’d never go back to and thinking about it… that’s pretty much how I’m feeling about my ex-husband: longing for someone I’d never go back to.

I always felt it was necessary to keep up some kind of communication with other people.

If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.

All prejudices are equally fatal to good government.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

Every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies.

There are people who believe in an absolutely transparent prose; with every respect for clarity of expression, I don't.