By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets...

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and...

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

Je ne suis pas plus moderne qu’ancien, pas plus Français que Chinois, et l’idée de la patrie c’est-à-dire l’obligation où l’on est de vivre sur un coin de terre marqué en rouge ou en bleu...

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

Quelle bassesse que de penser toujours au prolongement de son existence! La vie n’est bonne qu’à la condition d’en jouir. (ch. III)

I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want...

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

Aquela putain, Emma Bovary, tem a vida eterna e eu morro como um cão.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.

I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don’t...

Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in...

On days when it was too hot, they did not leave their room. The dazzling brilliance from outside plastered bars of light between the slats of the blinds. Not a sound in the village. Down...

Has it ever happened to you,” Léon went on, “to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes to you from afar, and as the completest expression...

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they’re just as useless! And they stay in the desert! Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I...

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Thought is the greatest of pleasures —pleasure itself is only imagination—have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?

One’s duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her...

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the...

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

rapture” – words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Sadness is a vice.

What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. . . I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests,...

But that which fanaticism formerly promised to the elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.

Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the...

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following...

The world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. We’re lucky to be living now.