Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.

Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist

Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.

Seguramente la soledad es peligrosa para las inteligencias que trabajan demasiado. Necesitamos tener a nuestro alrededor otras personas que nos comuniquen sus pensamientos. La soledad prolongada puebla de visiones fantasmales el vacío.

For a good book has this quality, that it is not merely a petrifaction of its author, but that once it has been tossed behind, like Deucalion's little stone, it acquires a separate and vivid life of its own.

I look forward to the day when a Mongolian idiot, treated bio-chemically, becomes a successful geneticist.