I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.

Only love can keep anyone alive.

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

For he who lives more lives than one more deaths than one must die.

M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.