A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

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

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.