Under Each Station Of The Real, Another

The Reason Why Life May Be Judged To Be Trivial Although At Certain Moments It Seems To Us So Beautiful Is That We Form Our Judgment, Ordinarily, Not On The Evidence Of Life Itself But Of Those Quite Different Images Which Preserve Nothing Of Life-and Therefore We Judge It Disparagingly.

We Only Really Know What Is New, What Suddenly Introduces To Our Sensibility A Change Of Tone Which Strikes Us, That For Which Habit Has Not Yet Substituted Its Pale Fac-similes.

Pleasures Are Like Photographs: In The Presence Of The Person We Love, We Take Only Negatives, Which We Develop Later, At Home, When We Have At Our Disposal Once More Our Inner Dark Room, The Door Of Which It Is Strictly Forbidden To Open While Others Are Present.

There Are Perhaps No Days Of Our Childhood We Lived So Fully As Those We Spent With A Favorite Book.

For Everyone Who, Having No Artistic Sense-that Is To Say, No Submission To Subjective Reality-may Have The Knack Of Reasoning About Art Till Doomsday, Especially If He Be, In Addition, A Diplomat Or Financier In Contact With The 'realities' Of The Present Day, Is Only Too Ready To Believe Literature Is An Intellectual Game Which Is Destined To Gradually Be Abandoned As Time Goes On.