Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Reality favors symmetry.
Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
In my next life I will try to commit more errors.
I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.