Photography is the product of complete alienation.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

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