The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.
No lady is ever a gentleman.
People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.
The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.
No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn’t a moustache?
I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me.
Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.
The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.