Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
It is not inspiration; it is expiration.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.
Find first, seek later.
At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.
We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall.
You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.