The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.

Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.