“The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.”

A good book is an event in my life.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

The difference breeds hatred.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

Don’t fear the gods, Don’t worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure.

Either belief in God is unconditional or it is no belief at all.

There exists no God. What exists is godliness, and that godliness surrounds you. We are all in the same ocean.

I prayed to God to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.

I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.

God to me is love.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.