There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort ... The need of work is in me.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.

I have come to the conclusion that the bed comprehends our whole life; for we were bom in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it.

I took the book from him reverently, and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of d…