She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.