Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

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

Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.