Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

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.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.