Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

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

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.