The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
I know nothing more noble than the contemplation of the world.
What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Everything is there: the love of Art.
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream
Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.
You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
COLD. Healthier than heat.
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.
Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
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