Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

To see one's name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.

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.

The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.