Lo importante no es curarse sino vivir con sus enfermedades.
A symbol is always in general and, however precise its translation, an artist can restore to it only its movement: there is no word-for-word rendering. Moreover, nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
The everyday man does not enjoy tarrying. Everything, on the contrary, hurries him onward. But at the same time nothing interests him more than himself, especially his potentialities.
When one day Rambert told him that he liked waking up at four in the morning and thinking of his beloved Paris, the doctor guessed easily enough, basing this on his own experience, that that was his favorite time for conjuring up pictures of the woman from whom he now was parted. This was, indeed, the hour when he could feel surest she was wholly his. At four in the morning one is seldom doing anything and, at that hour, even if the night has been a night of betrayal, one is asleep.
You haven’t a heart!” a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one. It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that,...
I always hope, in fact, that my interlocutor will be a policeman and that he will arrest me for the theft of ‘The Just Judges’”.
The world is divine because the world is inconsequential. That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential, is capable of grasping it.
I thought about how peculiar she was but forgot about her a few minutes later.
Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed. The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep.
Court was adjourned and my lawyer sat back down. He looked exhausted. But his colleagues came over to shake his hand. I heard: ‘That was brilliant!’ One of them even appealed to me... ‘Wasn’t it?’ he said. I agreed, but my congratulations weren’t sincere, because I was too tired.
Am fit. Always thinking of you. Love.
What struck me most about their faces was that I couldn’t see their eyes, just a faint, dull light in a nest of wrinkles.
I didn’t look in Marie’s direction. I didn’t have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people...
Somebody inside of me has always tried, with all his strength, to be nobody.
The struggle, itself, toward the summit suffices to fill the human heart.
He told me that he spent Saturdays and Sundays and all his days off there. “With my wife, of course,” he added. Just then his wife was laughing with Marie. For the first time maybe, I really thought I was going to get married.
Without desire, women bored me beyond all expectation, and obviously I bored them too. No more gambling and no more theater – I was probably in the realm of truth. But truth, cher ami, is a colossal bore.
Our feminine friends have in common with Bonaparte the belief that they can succeed where everyone else has failed.
A man with who one cannot reason is a man to be feared.