“Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.”

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

One can always reason with reason.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

I am very bad at expressing tender sentiments. The very word ‘love’ frightens me.

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.