What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

To understand the universe around us, we must understand the universe within us.

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

I pretend I'm not hurt, I walk about the world like I'm having fun.

Pain is not something to be feared; it is something to be understood.

Truth is the ground of science, the centre wherein all things repose, and is the type of eternity.

Those who have suffered much are like those who know many languages; they have learned to understand and be understood by all.

I had to go off the circuit twice to avoid him. I don't know what Rene Arnoux is doing in Formula One racing. He should be on the beach.