Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.