“Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.”

“That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.”

“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”

“You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.”

“As for the world, all reality has no other excuse for existence except to offer the poet the chance to play a sublime match against it -- a match that is list in advance.”

“Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon -- and falsehood, which is her armor.”

“I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and through a determined analysis of definite and previously prescribed conditions, whatever its value might be once it had been produced, did not leave the mind of its creator without having modified him, and forced him to recognize and in some way reorganize himself. I said to myself that it was not the accomplished work, and its appearance and effect in the world, that can fulfill and edify us; but only the way in which we have done it.”