Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

How can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we make a movement to preserve ourselves from death, in a world where love is provoked by a lie and consists solely in the need of having our sufferings appeased by whatever being has made us suffer?

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