Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don't insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don't let me hear a word about the rest.

I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller -- some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

Honour is manly decency. The shame of being found wanting in it means everything to us. Is this, then, the indefinable, the sacred thing?

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France -- that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

The loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses but terrible wives.

The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds.

Only silence is great; all else is weakness.

What is the use of theorizing as to wherein lies the charm that moves us?

What is a great life if not a youthful idea executed by a man of mature years.

The existence of the soldier, next to capital punishment, is the most grievous vestige of barbarism which survives among men.

Poetry is the disease of the brain.

I love the majesty of human suffering.

Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.