He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.

Indeed, for the last three years, he had carefully avoided her, as a result of the natural cowardice so characteristic of the stronger sex...

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.

There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.

I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.