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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
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An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
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He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
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Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
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Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
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To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.
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You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
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Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
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All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.
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A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
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By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
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To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
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There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
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A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
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The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
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Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.