46 quotes found
Writer · French · 1858–1915
French writer (1858–1915)
“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
“Art must break the chains, all rules and formulas.”
“Making mental sermons, can spoil delicious moments.”
“Literary style is the product of the toal phyisology.”
“We write as we feel, as we think, with our entire body.”
“Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.”
“We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.”
“Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.”
“It is fairly obvious that those who are in favour of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.”
“Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.”
“Most men who run down women are running down one woman only.”
“The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.”
“The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.”
“And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, acco...”
“It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; ...”
“To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.”
“Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to ...”
“It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.”
“Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.”
“Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any c...”
“Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from n...”
“Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to c...”
“The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possib...”
“Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops throug...”
“Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.”
