Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.