What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.