The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.
The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
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.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Everything is there: the love of Art.
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
Talent is a long patience.
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
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