 Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. |
| The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace. |
| Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. |
| In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life. |
| A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. |
| People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. |
| The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. |
| Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees. |
| The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. |
| Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. |
| We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. |
| Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. |
| A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu. |
| Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. |
| People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. |
| Love is space and time measured by the heart. |
| As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress. |
| We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison. |
| Love is a reciprocal torture. |
| We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond. |
