Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.