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.

Art is the accomplice of love.

The woman who loves always smells good.

Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad.

And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.

Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.

To know what everyone knows is to know nothing.