This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

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.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.