Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty.... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.