quotes from classic

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

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The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

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Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

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Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

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Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

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There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

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If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

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Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

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I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

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The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

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