Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.
One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.
Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.