Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

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.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.