Sometimes he sits at your feet looking into your face with an expression so gentle and caressing that the depth of his gaze startles you.

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

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly.

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.

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.

I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity.