Happiness may have but one night, as glory but one day.

How glorious it is - and also how painful - to be an exception.

I deeply wished I could make the stars all come down and breathe them; disappear in them

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

What I need is a woman who is something, anything: either very beautiful or very kind or in the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not approach what your best friends say behind your back.