The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers the most from its own limitations.

An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.

The itch is a mean, unconfessable, ridiculous malady; one can pity someone who is suffering ; someone who wants to scratch himself makes one laugh.

Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.