“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.

When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.

The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance.

Yes! live life with every fibre of one’s being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.

When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.

When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.