Glory — once achieved, what is it worth?

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.