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

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

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

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.