The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.
Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
A ruined man fell from her hands like a ripe fruit, to lie rotting on the ground.
One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.
If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer.
The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?
She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.
I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.
It all seemed a hollow sham now – that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she’d had enough of that; she wanted to live!
Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.
Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!
She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.