Quote collection
85 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that."
"To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters."
"You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government."
"Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist."
"Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare."
"The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death."
"A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption."
"Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food"
"It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living."
"There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress."
"Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."
"Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down."
"Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck."
"Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing."
"I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness."
"We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors."
"Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness."
"Abstinence is the worst form of perversion."
"A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one."
"...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra."