For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.