An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.

For the fact is that there is no humiliation so great that one should not accept it with unconcern, knowing that at the end of a few years our misdeeds will be no more than an invisible dust buried beneath the smiling and blooming peace of nature.

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, And dirty sluts in plenty, Smell sweeter than roses in young men's noses When the heart is one-and-twenty.