It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us from.
The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
There comes in all our lives a time ... when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.
Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
The only possible paradises are those we have lost
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.
To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.
To the pure all things are pure!
Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.
The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
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