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.

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

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

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.

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.