Edmond de Goncourt

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.

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.

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

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

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

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