with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
We see things but we don't see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appeal to us without the double bed in which we find peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the dark, things as light and fleeting as they are.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
To the pure all things are pure!
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
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