Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt

How utterly futile debauchery seems once it has been accomplished, and what ashes of disgust it leaves in the soul! The pity of it is that the soul outlives the body, or in other words that impression judges sensation and that one thinks about and finds fault with the pleasure one has taken.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.