To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

In that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.