There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.
It seems to me that had I not known Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or Freud or X or Z, I should have thought just as I did, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting, to cease fearing my thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands that were not uninhabitable because after all I found them already there .
The pettiness of a mind can be measured by the pettiness of its adoration or its blasphemy.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.
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.
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.
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
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.
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
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.
To win ones joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
Other people's appetites easily appear excessive when one doesn't share them.
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.
"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.
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.
Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.
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