France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

One can only forget about time by making use of it.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.