The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.
I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.
Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.
A doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient.
A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!
What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
The heart does not lie.
A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
In love, happiness is an abnormal state.
Death is in truth an illness from which we recover.
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Desire makes everything blossom.