Snicker on hearing his name: ‘the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.’
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one’s emotions.
The morality of art is in its very beauty.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled – inevitably – it’s the way with everything human.
One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
COLD. Healthier than heat.
I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.
The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don’t begrudge the giving of themselves.
You’ll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that’s to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Farming – a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.