The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.