A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

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

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.