 As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture. |
| The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman. |
| People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. |
| The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals. |
| A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world. |
| Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. |
| Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. |
| Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization. |
| Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins. |
| A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. |
| Genius is the talent of a person who is dead. |
| That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum. |
| The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it. |
| If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion. |
| Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs. |
| Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity. |
