Sourced and curated.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Candide · 1759

★ 7.6

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Candide · 1759

★ 7.4

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.3

Letter

1768

★ 7.1

Play

Hell is other people.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1944

★ 7.1

We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.1

God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

Pensees · 1662

★ 7.0

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Candide · 1759

★ 7.0

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worn, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Pensees · 1670

★ 7.0

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

The more things change, the more they are the same.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 7.0

Magazine

Alphonse Karr

1849

★ 6.9

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.4

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 6.2

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

Reflections · 1678

★ 6.1

The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 6.1

The sons of torture-victims make good terrorists.

Andre Malraux

Man's Fate · 1933

★ 6.0

The last act is bloody, no matter how happy the rest of the play.

Pensees · 1670

★ 5.5

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Historical literature · Feminist literature

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 5.5

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 5.5

Letter

1767

★ 5.4

Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 5.4

Extremes meet.

Louis Sebastian Mercier

1782

★ 5.3

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... Immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

In Search of Lost Time · 1913

★ 5.3

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.

In Search of Lost Time · 1921

★ 5.3

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires.

Reflections · 1678

★ 5.2

In the misfortune of our best friends we often find something that is not displeasing.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning, It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Reflections · 1678

★ 5.2

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 5.2

To name an object is to take away three-fourths of the pleasure given by a poem. This pleasure consists in guessing little by little to suggest it, that is the ideal.

Stephane Mallarme

1891

★ 5.1

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Andre Malraux

1943

★ 5.0

Essay

We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner

1967

★ 5.0

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.

Pensees · 1670

★ 4.7

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.

1656

★ 4.6

Philosophical literature

Philosophical Dictionary · 1764

★ 4.6

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

The first step is the hardest.

The Blood of Others · 1945

★ 4.6

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond

1763

★ 4.5

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

1778

★ 4.5

They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 4.5

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

Historical literature · Feminist literature

In Search of Lost Time · 1922

★ 4.5

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.5

The head is ever the dupe of the heart.

There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.5

Charles Baudelaire

1867

★ 4.5

Psychological literature

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Daniel Kahneman

Thinking, Fast and Slow · 2011

★ 4.5

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.4

The pleasure of love is in the loving. We are happier in the passion we feel than in that we arouse.

Reflections · 1678

★ 4.4

The most decisive actions of our life-I mean those that our most likely to decide the whole course of our future-are more often than not, unconsidered.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters · 1926

★ 4.4

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

Simone Weil

1940

★ 4.4

Autobiography and memoir

The world began without the human race and it will end without it... Man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle millions upon millions of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Tristes Tropiques · 1955

★ 4.4

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

Andre Malraux

1967

★ 4.3

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face.

Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly · 1997

★ 4.3

Historical literature · Feminist literature

To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.0

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

The skeptical are the most credulous.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

We shall die alone.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.9

We must cultivate our garden.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.

Democracy in America · 1835

★ 3.9

At every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors.