The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!