For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.

Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice.

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.

The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.