It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

Holland is a dream, Monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke-smokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole country, around the seas, along the canals.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.