The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

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

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

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

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

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.

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