The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.