No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?