When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Find your bones. Believe in what you are.

Life without risk is not worth living.

The secret of happiness is to be loving, cheerful, and appreciative.

Simplicity is all but nothing that's there.

The scene isn't one of perpetual death but of life circulating within itself.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

I always went to my sister, because she was older and had the care of me after my mother died.

Gardening is all about optimism. I put a seed in the ground. I consistently tend it, confident I will see the results, in time, of the nurture I have provided.

I can imagine that Rod Stewart likes giving autographs because he's pure showbusiness.