As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

To enlist the support of the people and of parliament, you only have to propose a profitable villainy.

No one will stop to help you when you are in need, but everyone forces opinions upon you that you do not require.

It is not a matter of desire, but of coercion and duty.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

How frightening it is to have reached the height of human accomplishment in art that must forever borrow from life's abundance.