Laissons les jolies femmes aux hommes sans imagination. Leave the pretty women for the men without imagination.
Le style, pour l’e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.
Things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.
Everybody calls “clear” those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.
The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.
There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer’s leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.
There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.