Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

The great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Dining with the Tories and thinking with the Liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies.

The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Les grandpères ont toujours tort.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

To be in love is to surpass one's self.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

There is a luxury in self-reproach.

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Life has always poppies in her hands.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

In nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

The remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him.

Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.

The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.

To define is to limit.

All good hats are made out of nothing. Like all good reputations.

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.

The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.

It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Anybody can be good in the country.

One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

There was purification in punishment.