No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

When a woman gets too old to be attractive to man, she turns to God.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves man from catching the complaint the second time.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work . . . as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.