“It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.”

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Our true passions are selfish.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy.

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

We delight in one knowable thing, which comprehends all that is knowable; in one apprehensible, which draws together all that can be apprehended; in a single being that includes all, above all in the one which is itself the all.

Revolutionary realism tries to draw the maximum advantage from every situation – that is what makes it revolutionary – but at the same time it does not permit us to set ourselves fantastic aims – that is what makes it realistic.

Do not be afraid to offer ideas that draw opposition. Remember, if no one is against your idea, then your idea probably doesn’t do anything.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn began to fall through the snow gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror. But when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again.

It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.