“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.”

Joy takes a strange effect at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow.

I am hungry, feed me; I am bored, amuse me.

We’ll go where the air is pure, where all sounds are soothing, where, no matter how proud one may be, one feels humble and finds oneself small- in short, we’ll go to the sea. I love the sea as one loves a mistress and I long for her when I haven’t seen her for some time

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

God is full of mercy for everyone, as He has been towards you. He is a father before He is a judge.

There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever.

There are misfortunes in life that no one will accept; people would rather believe in the supernatural and the impossible.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.

Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.

You scholars, you’re in communication with the devil.

Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.

Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

So he went down, smiling sceptically and mutter the final word in human wisdom: ‘Perhaps!

How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure!

Besides we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

I think I’ve done well in all. It’s important to keep doing something different and reinvent oneself to avoid stagnation from creeping in.

It takes loneliness in oneself to recognize it in another.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering.

There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.