Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
I live absolutely like an oyster.
Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.
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.
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.
What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.
I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all.
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom.
I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Beautiful things spoil nothing.