Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.