We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

There are three thing in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.

How you measure the performance of your managers directly affects the way they act.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

L'Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'

But an infinity of passions can be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a tiny space.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Stupidity is an immovable object: you can't try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

Farming -- a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Tout ce qu'on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

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