All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. |
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery. |
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom. |
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge. |
Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness. |
Our true passions are selfish. |
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth. |
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water. |
Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it. |
People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story. |
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music. |
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. |
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all. |
Only great minds can afford a simple style. |
Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit. |
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. |
What is really beautiful must always be true. |
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. |
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now. |
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness. |