Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present..

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug..

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences..

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries..

Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, a….

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been..

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture..

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 individu….

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead..

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum..

She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world i….

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion..

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have b….

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 incom….

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization..

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate..

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anythi….

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity..

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin..

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world..

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs..