“Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.”

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

“The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.”

“One morning one of us had run out of black; and that was the birth of Impressionism.”

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

“But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.”

“I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.”

“A loving person is one who is awakened and transformed into empathy.”

“The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.”

“To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.”