Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it.
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
After another moment’s silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
I rebel; therefore I exist.
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.