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

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.

The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius.

Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs… of our barbarous ancestors.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

Military men are the scourges of the world.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.