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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

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

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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.