The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Economized love is never real love.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.