Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
Truth is a point of view about things.
Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.
A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed.
The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.
We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.
Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.
To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.
Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.
We see things but we don’t see them, like things that slid through the mind, one flowing into another.
How else learn the real, if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
Under each station of the real, another glimmers.
To the pure all things are pure!
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
I have a horror of sunsets; they’re so romantic, so operatic.
The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other.
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.
A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.
There are optical illusions in time as well as space.
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.