Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.