Crete, Greece - 2006
1. “And indeed I felt happy with her, so perfectly happy, that the one desire of my mind was that it should differ in nothing from hers, and already I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sunwarmed flower bordered path.”
2. "Art is a collaboration between God an the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
3. "Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."
4. “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”
5. "Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness."
6. “Knowing how to free oneself is nothing; it's being free that is hard.”
7. ”"Know thyself" - a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to "know himself" would never become a butterfly.”
8. "I suffer a book as one suffers an illness. I now respect only the books that all but kill their authors.”
9. “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
10. "It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle."
11. "It is not so much about events that I'm curious, as about myself. There's many a man thinks he's capable of anything, who draws back when it comes to the point... What a gulf between the imagination and the deed! And no more right to take back one's move than at chess. Pooh! If one could foresee all the risks, there'd be no interests in the game!... Between the imagination and a deed and... Hullo! the bank's come to an end. Here we are on a bridge, I think, a river..."
12. “It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves--in finding themselves.”
13. “It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.”
14. ”I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.”
15. "Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly."
16. "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
17. “Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.”
18. "Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases."
19. “Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding."
20. "No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond."
21. "Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness."
22. "Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented."
23. “Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.”
24. “Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.”
25. "One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
26. “Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.”
27. “Sin is whatever obscures the soul.”
28. “That a germ of Michel (the immoralist) exists in me goes without saying. How many buds we bear in us, Scheffer, that will never blossom save in our books! They are 'dormant eyes' as the botanists call them. But if intentionally you suppress all of them _but one_, how it grows at once! How it enlarges, immediately monopolizing all the sap! My recipe for creating a fictional hero is very simple: take one of these buds and put it in a pot _all alone_; you soon achieve a wonderful individual. Advice: choose preferably (if it is true you can choose) the bud that bothers you the most. You get rid of it at the same time. This is perhaps what Aristotle called the purging of passions.”
29. "The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise."
30. "The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations."
31. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
32. “The most decisive actions of our life - I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future - are, more often than not, unconsidered.”
33. "The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling."
34. “There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.''
35. “The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.”
36. "The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity."
37. “That a germ of Michel (the immoralist) exists in me goes without saying. How many buds we bear in us… that will never blossom save in our books! They are 'dormant eyes' as the botanists call them. But if intentionally you suppress all of them _but one_, how it grows at once! How it enlarges, immediately monopolizing all the sap! My recipe for creating a fictional hero is very simple: take one of these buds and put it in a pot _all alone_; you soon achieve a wonderful individual. Advice: choose preferably (if it is true you can choose) the bud that bothers you the most. You get rid of it at the same time. This is perhaps what Aristotle called the purging of passions.”
38. “What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.”
39. “When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable; and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist's whole life, for his vocation must be irresistible.”
