It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it.

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

With one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

Fall in love with a dog's bum, And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

The remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were

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

Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.

Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.

My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.