To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.

A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble

If the secret of being a bore is to tell all, the secret of pleasing is to say just enough to be -not understood, but divined.

Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness