“To be simple is no small matter.”

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.

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Read in order to live.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.