You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.

Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified - that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.

A real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a live woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.

The person who doesn't know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other's foot on the nape of his neck.

Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason.

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.