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.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.