The purity of a person's heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals
When we love - we grow
Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.
Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly.
To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art.
Art is beauty the perpetual invention of detail the choice of words the exquisite care of execution.
[Great artists] do not copy what they see but what they desire.
If you are worthy of its affection a cat will be your friend but never your slave.
It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
Once [a cat] has given its love what absolute confidence what fidelity of affection!
With all women gentleness is the most persuasive and powerful argument.
Sooner barbarity than boredom.
Our busy age does not always have time to read but it always has time to look.
High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city.
Books follow morals and not morals books.
I was born to travel and write verse.
Brevity never fatigues; therefore brevity is always a welcome guest.
What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.
Yes I have loved as no one on earth ever loved with an insensate and furious love so violent that I wonder it did not break my heart
Fortune loves to give bedroom slippers to people with wooden legs and gloves to those with no hands.
It may well be that the pictures of Courbet Manet Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours already streaked with silver threads.
Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!
The cat is a dilettante in fur.
It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat.
The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude melancholy and toil.
[A cat] will lie the whole evening on your knee purring and happy in your society...
Cats are the tigers of us poor devils.
The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
[A cat] will make itself the companion of your hours of work of loneliness or of sadness.
Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears!
Critical lice are like body lice which desert corpses to seek the living.
You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Sometimes he sits at your feet looking into your face with an expression so gentle and caressing that the depth of his gaze startles you.
Eyes so transparent that through them the soul is seen.
I am a man for whom the outside world exists.
White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.
The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person painting has itself as it's purpose which is quite enough.
It is gentle manners which prove so irresistible in women.
What I write is not for little girls.
Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.
No one is truly dead until they are no longer loved.
The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.
Modesty was made for the ugly.
Yes the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process verse marble onyx or enamel.
I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity.
Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.