The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mold of arm or breast, but they will mold our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

These are the moments of revelation which compensate for the chaos, the discomfort, the toil of living.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Why are women ... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent... . There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.