Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. |
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. |
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. |
Everything great that we know has come from neurotics. never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. |
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill. |
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments |
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind |
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. |
His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness |
I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me. |
I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does not, in the current meaning of the word, invent it, but, since it exists already in each one of us, interprets it. The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter. |
I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant. |
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. |
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure. |
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey. |