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

...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.