Literature exists because the world isn't enough.

Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.