To have a true idea of man or of life, one must have stood himself on the brink of suicide, or on the door-sill of insanity, at least once.

Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.

There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty to the French woman a propriety.

We study ourselves three weeks, we love each other three months, we squabble three years, we tolerate each other thirty years, and then the children start all over again.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Four varieties in society: lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.

There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on, and imbeciles. The happiest are the imbeciles.

The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.

I wish to reproduce things as they are or as they would be even if I myself did not exist.

I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.