In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.

No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.

For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.