The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgment free.

Ideas often last but a day; feelings, dreams almost forever.

Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?

poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.

Of all things that can happen to us, triumph is the most difficult to endure when we are alone. Deprived of witnesses, it shrinks at once.

One knows less about one's own destiny than about anything else on earth.