In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

Words are the small change of thought.

How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing.

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.

Certainly there are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred.

There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live.

Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: “I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich."