Propos

I place Tolstoy very high; like a lighthouse illuminating the sea. But, notice this, I am not especially gripped by what are commonly called his ideas. They are very simple, and quite obvious. I would say almost too simple, too

Beautiful works are signs; no one doubts that; columns, vases, statues, portraits speak to the mind; if we return to them they have even more to say; but they only signify themselves; it’s a characteristic of the beautiful that it

Once the terms of a problem are precisely known, the problem is resolved; or then it’s impossible. So the solution is nothing else than the problem well clarified. When I know seven and five together precisely, I know twelve. The

Yesterday by chance I climbed the highest summit of poetry. The comparisons in the Iliad are like short daydreams. In the middle of the carnage, thoughts naturally turn away towards the order of things, wind, rain, seasons, or to the

The art of verse is without doubt the most difficult, the most moving and the most hidden of all the arts. Voltaire wrote thousands of verses, and not one is any good. Chateaubriand approaches poetry in his singing prose; but

To a melancholic I have only one thing to say: ‘Look into the distance’.  Almost always a melancholic is someone who reads too much. The human eye is not made for that distance; it’s in wide spaces that it rests.