“Read in order to live.”

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Your past will become a weight that holds you back and keeps you from living in the here and now. To put things in order means to put your past in order, too.

May you become as the waves of one sea, stars of the same heaven, fruits adorning the same tree, roses of one garden in order that through you the oneness of humanity may establish its temple in the world of mankind

You could say that tidying orders the mind while cleaning purifies it.

I want you to be happy…to laugh, smile and rejoice in order that others may be made happy by you.

In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.

Your real life begins after putting your house in order.

To do that I knew I had to learn French. In order to practice I started to write journals in French. The effort I made to master what I regarded a bad thing – a language owned by the rich Moroccans – brought me the ability to write.

Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.