An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.