Poems List

You cannot do anything good for a dead man! Whatever goodness you want to do for him, do it when he is alive!

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting himself and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary while the greater ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

I brought children into this dark world because it needed the light that only a child can bring.

Before making a great movement, stay motionless for a good while! If you give legs to the rocks, they will start running like crazy horses! Stillness accumulates liveliness; laziness accumulates industriousness; sleep accumulates motion!

There are powers inside of you, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.

Children make you want to start life over.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving.

Every time you go to the zoo, you prolong the captivity of the animals there! If no one goes to the zoos, there will be no zoos! Destroying the evil is very simple and it is in your hand!

The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.

Flowers represent hope for us; but we do not represent hope for them! Let us keep the flowers in the soil; no plucking!

Good manners open the closed doors; bad manners close the open doors!

Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.

A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made.

If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

The difference between our democracy and a dictatorship is that we get to choose the person who is going to screw us.

Ludwig von Beethoven had never mastered the elements of arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction. A thirteen-year-old boy whom he had befriended tried unsuccessfully to teach him simple multiplication and division.

Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.

Sometimes one has to go against what is proper in order to do what is right

Sometimes you have to drown to keep someone else above water.

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

The footprints of a free-minded man are always towards the forward direction.