To be ready to fail is to be prepared for success.
Jose Bergamin
Sensuality without love is a sin; love without sensuality is worse than a sin.
To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.
True solidarity is only possible among the solitary.
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
To be thirsty and to drink water is the perfection of sensuality rarely achieved. Sometimes you drink water; other times you are thirsty.
Happiness is always a coincidence.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
There are no good or bad habits. All habits are, by definition, bad.
An ignorance of Marx is as frequent among Marxists as an ignorance of Christ is among Catholics.
When you are listening to music it is better to cover your eyes than your ears.
A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.
The quality of a man's mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket.
There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.
It may be impossible to have a revolution without crimes but that does not make revolution a crime.
Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.
Man is a question; woman is an answer. The mistake women make today is to offer themselves as answers before being questioned.
You can say the opposite of something you've said but you can't do the opposite of something you've done.
To sin offers repentance and forgiveness; not to sin offers only punishment.
The most original sin is not the thinker's but the poet's.
A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.
Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.
True art tries not to attract attention in order to be noticed.
The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.
Theology is the logic of the Devil.
In French literature, you can choose a la carte; in Spanish literature, there is only the set meal.
Pride in a man is confused with dignity; in a woman, with self-love.
Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.
When there is nothing to fear is the time to begin fearing everything.
Who learns most from a good book is the author.
A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.
The man who spends all his time looking up to heaven is not always the best; in fact, he is usually the worst.
You can hesitate before deciding, but not once the decision is made.
Do we have to talk in order to agree or agree in order to talk?
If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.
The first condition for making music is not to make a noise.
Better than succeeding little by little is failing at one go.
Art is good but it isn't the best.
Even if you're not going anywhere, don't get in the way.
Drinking spirits cannot cause spiritual damage.
Only one thing has to matter for everything to matter.
A reformer knows neither how to do nor to undo.
We say of an animal that it is intelligent, and we say the same thing of a woman; but in neither case is it usually appropriate, clearly for very different reasons.
The only time a man thinks is when he's alone.
