Edmund (Louis Antoine Huot) de Goncourt (1822-1896) and Jules (Alfred Huot) de Goncourt

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

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

Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

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