I think that it would be less difficult to live eternally than to be deprived of sleep throughout life.

There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.