It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

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.

The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.