A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias - because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love - we must be stingy with it.

Everything for me becomes allegory

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?

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.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

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.