And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.