I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with...

The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce...

Love is the emplem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time; effaces all memory of begining, all fear of an end.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in...

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

Common sense is not so common.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and...

To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent.

It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.