Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.