If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

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.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.