Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

The most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.