“All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.”

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

To feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

The way to change others’ minds is with affection, and not anger.