Do not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.
How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph!
The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.
How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.
In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.
It is easy for a somebody to be modest, but it is difficult to be modest when one is a nobody.
Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn’t know where to put himself.
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
In morals, always do as others do; in art, never.
The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.
At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot.
A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.
You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.
We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.
It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and to be filled with eagerness to live.
It is more difficult to be an honorable man for a week than to be a hero for fifteen minutes.
God does not believe in our God.
Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.
Somewhere in the shadow cast by every famous man is a feminine victim.
Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?