Quotes on Literature

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.