If the melon insists on having slices, it will end up eaten by families.

Boredom and idleness are, I think, the principal motives for devotion.  We only lift our eyes to the heavens when we have nothing to do or hope for on earth, and we only kiss holy images when we have nothing else to kiss.

Military officers are free to break their swords.

I pardon my children, as a condemned man pardons his executioners.

There are, as one knows, two ways to practice cannibalism: to eat human beings or to be eaten by them.

The ant economizes to assume alimentary security.  Such security consists of continual privation.

The idea of God dates exactly from the day when the quadruped — or quadrumane — felt the muscles of his buttocks hard and strong enough to permit a vertical position.  That day he looked up at the sky and feared it would fall on his head.  And, since he was not using his hands to walk, he clasped them together.

The sun is a cold globe, solid and homogenous.  Its surface is divided into square meters, which are the bases of long attenuated inverted pyramids, 696,699 meters long, their points one kilometer from the surface.

Liberty, equality, fraternity.  In other words: liberty for the strongest, to impose his fraternal, equal, and free principles on his subordinates.

The flag: something that hangs.

Drowned men seldom travel in schools, as fish do.  We can infer that their social science is still embryonic, unless we judge it simpler to suppose that it is their combativeness and military valor that are inferior to those of fish.  That is why the latter eat the former.

(Translated and posted by Doug Skinner)