Our duty is to feel what is great and love what is beautiful -- not to accept all the social conventions and the infamies they impose on us.

'Do you really not know,' he said, 'that there exist souls that are ceaselessly in torment? That are driven now to dreams, now to action, driven from the pures…

Never had her eyes been so enormous, so dark, so deep: her whole being was transfigured by some subtle emanation.

And they talked about the mediocrity of provincial life, so suffocating, so fatal to all noble dreams.

When you put the corset on it gives you a glimpse into what those women's lives must have been like, a little bit. Just the fact that they did that to themselv…

It is true that for us art is not an end in itself, we have lost too many of our illusions for that. Art is for us an occasion for social criticism, and for re…

'Our society is besotted by the cult of the ego: books, television programmes, films, literature, magazines, are awash with stories and dramas about personal r…