Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
Laughter is the mind’s intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.
History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.
Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.
The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.
Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.
Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.
Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.
Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.
Princes enjoy themselves like children in the company of ordinary human beings.
Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.
She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.
She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others.
We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire.
What is a vice? Merely a taste you do not share.