Influences

“Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”

“Commencer à penser, c'est commencer à être miné.”

“The activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplation.”

“In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.”

“The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.”

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.”

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”

“Words are concepts, but concepts are lines—number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.).”

“We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose.”

“If we judge of love by the majority of its results it rather resembles hatred than friendship.”

“On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis (G. Flaubert). Here I have got you, you nihilist! A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”

“Just as a tyranny of truth and science would be in a position to raise the value of falsehood, a tyranny of prudence could force into prominence a new species of nobleness. To be noble then might mean, perhaps, to be capable of follies.”

“Speaking is a fine madness; with it man dances over and above all things.”

“Soyons vrais, même si nous sommes laids.”

“Language remains the master of man.”

“Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”

“Nothing seemed to hurt quite so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice.”

“Je dis : une fleur ! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.”

“Trouve avant de chercher.”

“Regarder, c’est-à-dire oublier le nom des choses que l’on voit.”

“Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.”

“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.”

“Now I am terrified at the Earth—it is that calm and patient; it grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.”