The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.

How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.

I love to think of those naked epochs Whose statues Phoebus liked to tinge with gold. At that time men and women, lithe and strong, Tasted the thrill of love free from care and prudery, And with the amorous sun caressing their loins They gloried in the health of their noble bodies.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care.

Listen, my dear-- with soft step the night hears.

The Beautiful is always strange.