A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.

We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God

Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.

No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.