Paul Bourget Quotes

“At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the
tone in which they are uttered.”

— Paul Bourget

“Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of the
sinful.”

— Paul Bourget

“One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.”

— Paul Bourget

“It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's
youthful ideals.”

— Paul Bourget

“Even after making up one's mind to the sacrifices I
had decided upon, there is always left a trace of envy
for those who have triumphed in the melancholy
struggle for literary supremacy”

— Paul Bourget

“We must live as we think, otherwise we shall end up by thinking as we have lived.”

— Paul Bourget

“Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.”

— Paul Bourget

“Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.”

— Paul Bourget

“There is no such thing as an age for love ... because the man capable of loving - in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation - never ceases to love.”

— Paul Bourget

“There is only one way to be happy by means of the heart: not to have one.”

— Paul Bourget

“There are some surely whom you like and whom you dislike, for whom you entertain esteem and for whom you feel contempt? Have you not thought that you have some duties toward them, that you can aid them in leading better lives?”

— Paul Bourget

“There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.”

— Paul Bourget

“A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.”

— Paul Bourget

“There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is a falsehood.”

— Paul Bourget

The forests have taught man liberty.

— Paul Bourget

“There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.”

— Paul Bourget

I wasn't really asleep I was just meditating on unconsciousness.

— Paul Bourget

Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.

— Paul Bourget

“Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.”

— Paul Bourget