...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

To lie about a far country is easy

A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing