“Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.”

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Love ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Now a work of art is a work of nature, but it is a work of human nature. It is a work of the mind: and it’s a work of the mind in circumstances for an occasion which, to which, for which, and which it may be supremely natural and simple and effective.

When we speak we create.

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man, I want you to know that.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Art perpetuates beauty. Beauty is a symptom of the force that is nature. You are a force of nature, I love you.