Quote collection
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"Le style, pour l'e crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision."
"The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition."
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory."
"Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?"
"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists."
"This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman."
"Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth."
"Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change."
"And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?"
"How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory."
"In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time."
"But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine."
"For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is."
"The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other."
"There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'."
"That translucent alabaster of our memories."
"Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere."
"We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes."
"And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors."
"For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second."