The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

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

Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.

Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour.

Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.

There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.

What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.