Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Any man who does not see everything in terms of self, that is to say who wants to be something in respect of other men, to do good to them or simply give them something to do, is unhappy, disconsolate, and accursed.

There are moments when, faced with our lack of success, I wonder whether we are failures, proud but impotent. One thing reassures me as to our value: the boredom that afflicts us. It is the hall-mark of quality in modern men.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.