We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.