There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable..

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and ….

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

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….

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….

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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

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

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

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….

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

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences..