Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.
The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.
Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”
The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
A work of art is an exaggeration.
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.
If life were organized, there would be no need for art.
What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.
Humanity cherishes its swaddling clothes; but it shall not grow up unless it can free itself from them. Turning down his mother's breast does not make the weaned child ungrateful. ... Rise up naked, valiant; make the sheaths crack; push aside the stakes; to grow straight you need no more than the thrust of your sap and the call of the sun.
Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.
Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.
From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.
One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.
Our deeds attach themselves to us like the flame to phosphorus. They constitute our brilliance, to be sure, but only in so far as they consume us.
You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.
Drunkenness is never anything but a substitute for happiness.
Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
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