The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.