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

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

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.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

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.

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