History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

Genius is the talent of a person who is dead.