Love knows nothing of modesty.
The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.
Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer.
It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.
Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.
In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.
In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women.
Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.
Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.
The greatest joy a petty soul can taste is to dupe a great soul and catch it in a snare.