The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.

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.

A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification.