There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

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.

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

A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.