An imbecile is never bored: he contemplates himself.
And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.
Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.
Art must break the chains, all rules and formulas.
Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.
Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.
Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.
Innocence has its instincts, its needs, its physiological dues.
It is well-nigh obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinities with murderers than those who oppose it.
Knowledge has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species.
Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.
Making mental sermons, can spoil delicious moments.
Man has made use of his intelligence; he invented stupidity.
Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.
Modesty is the delicate form of hypocrisy.
Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.
Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.
Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
Science is the only truth and it is the great lie. It knows nothing, and people think it knows everything. It is misrepresented. People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. It is life devouring itself. It is the sensibility transformed into intelligence. It is the need to know stifling the need to live. It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius.
Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand.
Since art is the expression of beauty and beauty can be understood only in the form of the material elements of the true idea it contains, art has become almost uniquely feminine. Beauty is woman, and also art is woman.
The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous.
The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.
The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
The woman who loves always smells good.
Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time.
To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.
Two elements are needed to form a truth- a fact and an abstraction.
Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
Women are complex, of course not more so than men, but in a different way that men cannot understand.
Women don't understand themselves and what is more they do not care about understanding.
Women feel and it suffices to steer them satisfactorily through life as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. It is only through feelings one can get in contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women and that is to love them.
Women live entirely in the present, men much more in the future where nature is less well organized.
Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
Found 39 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
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