The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.

The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.

A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.

Talent does whatever it wants to do. Genius does only what it can.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.

The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.