Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

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

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.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

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

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.