Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

Believing in Hell must distort every judgement on this life.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

We create the world in which we live; if that world becomes unfit for human life, it is because we tire of our responsibility.