The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
When I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresol...
She already loved me too much to see me as I was.
In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan.
I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of t...
The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave,...
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us
In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...
Nothing can make a face more impenetrable than the mask of kindliness.
Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
Rather than recount his life as he has lived it, he must live his life as he will recount it.
To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so...
What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.
I do not want to recollect. I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's fre...
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of re...
Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
Do you know why our poetry today and especially our philosophy are such dead issues? Because they've cut themselves off from life. Now, Greece idealized on life's own level: an artist's life was alrea...
I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, "Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful...
This is my thesis: Do you know what is needful to turn an honest man into a rogue! A change of scene--a moment's forgetfulness suffice.
