“Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food”

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered.

Champagne- the wine of kings, the king of wines.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

Those men, those of former times, had soul and eyes that in no way resemble ours, and in their veins, along with their blood, flowed something that has disappeared: love and admiration for the Beautiful.

The only certainty is death.

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.

To lie about a far country is easy.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.

One sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.