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What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.

Henri Matisse

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Matisse, Henri. "Notes d'un peintre [Notes of a Painter]." Le Grande Revue, 25 Dec. 1908.

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Matisse, Henri. "Notes of a Painter." Matisse on Art, translated and edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1995, ch. 2.

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A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

Mistinguett

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Mistinguett. Quoted in "Limelights and Footlights." Written by Hedy Clark. Theatre Arts, 1955.

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To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Graziella

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De Lamartine, Alphonse. "Graziella." Les Confidences, 1849.

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De Lamartine, Alphonse. Graziella, translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pt. 4, ch. 5.

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It is easier to make war than to make peace.

Georges Clemenceau

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Clemenceau, Georges. "Discours de Paix [Speech on Peace]." 20 July 1919, Verdun, France.

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The beautiful implies a combination of many different qualities. Strength alone, without elegance, etc., is not beauty. In a single word, the broadest definition would be harmony.

Eugène Delacroix

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Delacroix, Eugène. Undated journal entry. c. 1854.

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Delacroix, Eugène. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix: A Selection, translated by Lucy Norton, edited by Hubert Wellington. Phaidon, 1995.

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Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea.

Alain (Emile Chartier)

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Chartier, Émile [published as Alain]. Propos sur le Religion no. 74. Editions Rieder, 1938.

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The theory of probabilities is at bottom only common sense reduced to calculus.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

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Laplace, Pierre-Simon. Theorie Analytique des Probabilities [Analytic Theory of Probability]. Paris: Madame Va Courcier, 1812.

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We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all costs, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.

Albert Camus

The Fall

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Camus, Albert. La Chute [The Fall]. Editions Gallimard, 1956.

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In the realm of the emotions, the real is indistinguishable from the imaginary.

Andre Gide

The Counterfeiters

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Original Citation

Gide, Andre. Les Faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters]. Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1925, pt. 1, ch. 8.

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Current Citation

Gide, Andre. The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy Bussy. Penguin Books, 1990, pt. 1, ch. 8.

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The customer is never wrong.

Cesar Ritz

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Ritz, Cesar. Quoted in Piccadilly to Pall Mall: Manners, Morals and Man, by Ralph Nevill and Charles Edward Jerningham. Duckworth & Co, 1908.

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Prose was born yesterday-this is what we must tell ourselves. Poetry is pre-eminently the medium of past literatures. All the metrical combinations have been tried but nothing like this can be said of prose.

Gustave Flaubert

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Flaubert, Gustave. Letter to Louise Colet. 24 Apr. 1852.

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Flaubert, Gustave. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Faber and Faber, 1981.

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Civilized people must get off their high horse and learn with humble lucidity that they too are an indigenous variety.

Alain Finkielkraut

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Finkielkraut, Alain. La défaite de la pensée [The Undoing of Thought]. Gallimard, 1987.

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The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin

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De Coubertin, Pierre. Banquet given by the British Government. 24 July 1908, Grafton Galleries, London, England, UK.

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Your true amateur sips his wine; as he lingers over each separate mouthful, he obtains from each the sum total of pleasure that he would have experienced had he emptied his glass at a single draught.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

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Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste [Physiologie du Goût]. Paris, 1825, meditation 2.

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Current Citation

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, translated by M. F. K. Fisher. Vintage, 2011, meditation 2.

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Ah, this, that we call happiness, how intimate a part of the soul it is, and of what little importance are the outside elements which seem to go to its making!

Andre Gide

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Original Citation

Gide, Andre. La Porte Etroite [Strait is the Gate]. Mercure de France, 1909, ch. 5.

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Gide, Andre. Strait is the Gate. Penguin Books, 2001, ch. 5.

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We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake... The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

Victor Cousin

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Cousin, Victor. "Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien." Cours de philosophie. École Normale Supérieure, 1818, Paris, France.

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The right sort of love is recognized by the sort of joy, of general excitement, of exultant life which the presence of someone produces in us and which distinguishes them. You feel better when with them.

Paul Valéry

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Valéry, Paul. Notebook entry. c. 1945.

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Life is short. Work is for those who will never be able to understand life. Idleness cannot degrade a man. To the discriminating eye it differs from laziness.

René Maran

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Original Citation

Maran, Rene. Batouala. Albin Michel, 1921, ch. 1.

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Maran, Rene. Batouala, translated by Adele Szold Seltzer. Heinemann, 1988, ch. 1.

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Conversation... Is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all.

Guy de Maupassant

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Original Citation

Maupassant, Guy De. Sur l'Eau [Afloat]. Paris: Libraire Ollendorff, 1888.

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Maupassant, Guy De. Afloat, translated by Douglas Parmée. NYRB Classics, 2008.

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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.