Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

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?

A leader is someone who figures out the way, then gets out of the way so others can lead.

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

Charity erodes the cultural prerequisites for a vigorous democracy.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

How can you truly know what success is, if you’ve never experienced failure?

Playing Augusta is like playing a Salvador Dali landscape. I expected a clock to fall out of the trees and hit me in the face.

The angels are ministering spirits; they are not governing spirits.

Next I must tell about the machine of Ctesibius, which raises water to a height.

I like telling the story in a visual way. I don't like explaining a lot in dialogue.