The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily

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.

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.