The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

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Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

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The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

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Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

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