The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

Talent is long patience.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.