“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.

I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.