Novelist

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

Jangan membaca, seperti halnya anak-anak, untuk menyenangkan diri, atau seperti orang ambisius, demi mendapatkan instruksi. Jangan, membacalah untuk hidup.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

Read much, but not many books.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.