"The Dürer coat-of-arms is both an ideogram for “Gateway in Heaven” and a rebus for “I engrave the gateway”..."

"Up to this period it had been his custom to dine at a table d'hôte. But he now began to keep house himself..."

"At last, becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to live spending his time in walking about the mountains; feeding on grasses and plants."

"When he was asked what advantage he had ever derived from philosophy, he replied: “The advantage of being able to converse with myself"."

[Extracts] "Time makes even bronze grow old : but thy glory, Diogenes, all eternity will never destroy..."

"Men ... ought to make the search after wisdom their principal care ; for wisdom is the true nourishment of the mind." Descartes

"Perhaps no one of all the men of genius who have lived in recent times has had so lonely a soul and led so lonely a life as Leopardi."

[Extracts] “Art is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.” ― Max Beckmann

"Life, to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame..."

"When weary with the long day's care And earthly change from pain to pain And lost, and ready to despair Thy kind voice calls me back again"

"A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis"."

"And this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star."

"But how to heal myself ? How transform despair into hope, weakness into willpower ?"

[Extract] "Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come..."

"There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth."

"When Narcissus died, the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears."

"If someone asked me what I deserve, I would say in all honesty before God that I deserve hard labor. Not because of Tiflis, however..."

"The truly gifted always remain in obscurity amongst the crowd and shun as much as possible the display of their talents."

[Text] "Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, who had been for three months apprenticed to Alyahin the shoemaker, was sitting up on Christmas Eve..."

"A group of pleasant people in idyllic surroundings, hopelessly at odds with themselves and with one another."

"- Gentlemen, I stake two million !" "- Agreed ! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom !" said the young man."

[Paintings) “I haven’t been able to restrain myself from painting, so beautiful are the motifs that surround my garden.” Camille Pissarro

[Letters] "O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy..."