We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.