A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead; therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everybody knows it, and everyone forgets it.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.