Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.