When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbling of reality and you accept it.
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Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.
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A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
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A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
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If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.
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You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
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No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
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The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it -- can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
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Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.
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Tears fell from my eyes--yes, weak and foolish as it now appears to me, I wept for my departed youth; and for that beauty of which the faithful mirror too plainly assured me, no remnant existed.
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Love works in miracles every day such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools favouring the passions, destroying reason, and in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy.
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When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.
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The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.
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Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.
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Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.
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Science conducts us, step by step, through the whole range of creation, until we arrive, at length, at God.
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The chief prerequisite for a escort is to have a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness.
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Arles is certainly one of the most interesting towns I have ever seen, whether viewed as a place remarkable for the objects of antiquity it contains, or for the primitive manners of its inhabitants and its picturesque appearance.
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In love there are no vacations No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
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Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
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Tears may be dried up, but the heart - never.
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The best way to fill time is to waste it.
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I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
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There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness
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Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn't desire the man offering himself to her. It's the desire of a woman for a man who hasn't yet come to her, whom she doesn't yet know. She's faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.
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It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.
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A woman of honor should never suspect another of things she would not do herself.
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A woman of honor should not expect of others things she would not do herself.
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Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.
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