You don't have to write to me if you don't feel like it. There's no real friendship without absolute freedom.

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

... what is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph?

Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund.

Some say that cats are devils, but they behave badly only when they are alone. When they are among us cats are angels.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.