Je voudrais arrêter le temps, arrêter l'heure. Mais elle va, elle va, elle passe, elle me prend de seconde en seconde un peu de moi pour le néant de demain. Et je ne revivrai jamais.

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments."

[On Water]

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!

Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!