When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.