One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

Any truth creates a scandal.

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.