Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in...
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic the passions that we feel expand it those that we inspire contract it and habit fills up the rest.
It is always thus impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last that we make our irrevocable decisions.
All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
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...
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the dir...
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.
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
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.
We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes...
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 they
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished...
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enri...
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
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...
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....