It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us.
We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.
The most beaten paths are certainly the surest, but do not hope to start much game on them.
I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.
Understand that the only possession of any value is life.
The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
What eludes logic is the most precious element in us, and one can draw nothing from a syllogism that the mind has not put there in advance.
It is often so: the harder it is to hear, the more a truth is worth saying.
Man is extraordinarily clever in preventing himself from being happy; it would seem that the less able he is to endure misfortune the more apt he is to attach himself to it.
It is one of life’s laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.
If life were organized, there would be no need for art.
When I cease to be indignant I will have begun my old age.
He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.
How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.
Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.
Though a revolution may call itself “national,” it always marks the victory of a single party.
Solitude is bearable only with God.
Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.
In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.