Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.

All the products of one period have something in common; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses. And nothing reminds me so much of the monthly parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, and of various books by Gérard de Nerval, that used to hang outside the grocer's door at Combray, than does, in its rectangular and flowery border, supported by recumbent river-gods, a 'personal share' in the Water Company.

Although it is rightly said that there can be no progress, no discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist starting afresh on an individual effort cannot be either helped or hindered therein by the efforts of any other, it must none the less be acknowledged that, in so far as art brings to light certain laws, once an industry has popularized them, the art that was first in the field loses retrospectively a little of its originality.

There is a beauty in being surrounded by the foreign – seeing things from a new perspective, with new eyes

Nasıl ki bazı yaratıklar, tabiatın üretmekten vazgeçtiği bir canlı türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, düşüncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemiş olsa–ruhlar arasında mevcut olabilecek iletişimin yegâne örneği de müzik mi diye düşünüyordum. Müzik, devamı gelmemiş bir olasılık gibidir; insanlık başka yollara, konuşma ve yazı diline sapmıştır.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.

But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love.