In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.