In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

La literatura es la manera más agradable de ignorar la vida.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.

The startling reality of things is my discovery every single day.

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.

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.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.