We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.