Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.