It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
We all have such fateful objects – it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another – carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane’s heart always break.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.
Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise – a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames – but still a paradise.
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, ‘schools’ and ‘movements’ are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
There is an old American saying ‘He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.