"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

"Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization."

"Genius is the talent of a person who is dead."

"The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman."

"Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins."

"That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum."

"The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals."

"A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin."

"Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present."

"As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture."

"Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity."

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."

"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."

"People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug."

"Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs."

"The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it."