Edmond de Goncourt

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.

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

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.

Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?