Top 100 Quotes

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.

One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.

When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten', he does not say 'My men were beaten.'

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

The one thing that matters is the effort.

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.

Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.

Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

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

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.