People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
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.
Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.
Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.