What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.