Quote collection
299 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!"
"What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!"
"Success as I see it is a result, not a goal."
"Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature."
"For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act."
"As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop."
"Ah! In fact there are two moralities ... The petty one, the conventional one, the one devised by men, that keeps changing and bellows so loudly, making a commotion down here among us, in a perfectly pedestrian way ... But the other one, the eternal one, is all around and above us, like a landscape that surrounds us and the blue sky that gives us light."
"One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form."
"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."
"I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly."
"I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity."
"If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!"
"Le charme de la nouveaute , peu a' peu tombant comme un ve" t ement, laissait voir a' nu l'e ternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les me" mes formes et le me" me langage. The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language."
"But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."
"To be simple is no small matter."
"Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force."
"I have dreamed much and have done very little."
"Everyone became brave from excess of terror."
"I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!"
"I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen."