Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

But what world says that [I'm wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.

Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimagininative.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.