The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.

How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page; it writes three hundred.

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting and vanishing.

Truth makes many appeals, not the least of which is its power to shock.