“En effet, lorsque l'époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre est plate et bête, l'artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d'un autre siècle.”

“Pourquoi nous haïr? Nous sommes solidaires, emportés par la même planête, équipage d'un même navire. Et s'il est bon que des civilisations s'opposent pour favoriser des synthèses nouvelles, il est monstrueux qu'elles s'entre-dévorent.Puisqu'il suffit, pour nous délivrer, de nous aider à prendre conscience d'un but qui nous relie les uns aux autres, autant le chercher là où il nous unit tous.(Terre des Hommes, ch. VIII)”

“The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.”

“D'un côté, la rigueur va à l'encontre du laxisme, de la nonchalance mentale, du laisser-aller, de l'à-peu-près - en somme, de tous ces fléaux qui, depuis trop longtemps, débilitent nos pays d'Orient. D'un autre côté, la rigueur est raideur, elle est rigidité morale - et en cela elle va à l'encontre de ce qui fait la suavité, et l'art de vivre, de nos contrées.(p.144)”

“Wie ein Eremit war er des Lebens überdrüssig und er-wartete nichts mehr von ihm: reif zur Einsamkeit; und ebenso war er gleich einem Mönch unendlich matt; er wollte sich sammeln, nichts mehr gemein haben mit den Weltlichen, die für ihn die Utilitaristen und Dummköpfe waren.”

“literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.”

“Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.”