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.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.