Alfred De Musset

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep

What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream

The only true language in the world is a kiss.

A happy memory is perhaps on this earth truer than happiness itself.

The most despairing songs are the most beautiful, and I know some immortal ones that are pure tears.

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.

I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them

With a kiss let us set out for an unknown world.

If love is a play, this play, as old as the world, fiasco or not, it is, all in all, the least bad thing that has so far been found. The roles are trite, I admit, but if the play had no value the whole universe wouldn’t know it by heart