I am a man for whom the outside world exists.

It is gentle manners which prove so irresistible in women.

[A cat] will make itself the companion of your hours of work, of loneliness, or of sadness.

Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage.

Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.

Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears!

Yes I have loved, as no one on earth ever loved, with an insensate and furious love, so violent that I wonder it did not break my heart