Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

Sometimes I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me

On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.

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.

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