The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

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