Quote collection
299 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!"
"Read in order to live."
"It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."
"It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return."
"What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless."
"One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts."
"A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man."
"For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat."
"I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul."
"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."
"All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough."
"Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying."
"There is no truth. There is only perception."
"Only three things are infinite. The sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water, and the heart in its tears."
"Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art."
"One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness."
"What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"
"For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."
"We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep"