Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
It is always thus impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last that we make our irrevocable decisions.
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is...
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can...
For even if we have the sensation of being always surrounded by our own soul, it is not as though by a motionless prison: rather, we are in some sense borne along with it in a perpetual leap to go bey...
As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary....
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as wh...
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to...
The air of those rooms was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I never went into them without a sort of greedy anticipation, particularly on those first morn...
Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.
The past not merely is not fugitive it remains present.