Edmond de Goncourt

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

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 painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.