Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.