Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there!

I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being.

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.