As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves.

There are moments, you reach moments, when all of a sudden time stops and becomes eternal.

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

It's in the homes of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.

I utter what you would not dare think.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.