For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

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

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.

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.

the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.