Poems List

Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.

I envy people who drink - at least they know what to blame everything on.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

God has made man a cosmopolite. He created seas for ships to glide on, the wind to push them, and the stars to guide them even in darkest night.

I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.

The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there.

Virtue lies in the middle ground.

It is not enough to conquer one must learn to seduce.

Children should neither be seen nor heard from - ever again.

Equal Rights were created for everyone.

Man is multiplied by the "number of languages" he possesses and speaks. (Los Viajes!)

The secret of being boring is to tell everything.

How would it be if we discovered that aliens only stopped by earth to let their kids take a leak?

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.

Man works for an object. Remove that object and you reduce him into inaction.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others.

The public is a ferocious beast -- one must either chain it up or flee from it.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation.