A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

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.