Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors..

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the co….

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more ….

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure ….

It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when….

At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, t….

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking an….

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our dispos….

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge..

To the pure all things are pure!.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the ….

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is..

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius..

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and….

I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate….

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'..

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even….

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity..

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary….

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine de….

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed..