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.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

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.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.