Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.