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.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

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.

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.