Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.
The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife.
Only by avoiding the beginning of things can we escape their end.
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom.
No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.
The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.
As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.
When in doubt, choose greatness.
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
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