Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.
The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.
And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.
To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.
The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
I’m in mourning for my life.
Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.
All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.
Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms.
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: “My work is literature.”