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

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.

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.

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

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

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.