As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.