Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

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

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

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

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.