Edmond de Goncourt

[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

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.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.