Une philosophie doit etre portative.
~ Paul Valéry
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.
Life blackens at the contact of truth.
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.
A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.
To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
Love is being stupid together.
At times I think and at times I am.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
