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

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.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

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

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.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Love is a serious mental disease.

High above the noise and fear mongering of critics and cynics softly speaks your true self.

Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)

Maybe love, unfathomable love, was too much for people, so they had traded it for something easier.

I am Thorn, and I have come to make you bleed,

Think about it. Every time you fail at a task you've actually learned something new. The question is "what?"

Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

Where the sole employer is the state, [opposition] means death by slow starvation.

Only they who fulfill God's commands have a claim on the Lord.

Maybe you don't have to remember something for it to be true. For it to exist.