“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

There comes in all our lives a time, when the ears can listen to no music save what the moonlight breathes through the flute of silence.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

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

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

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

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.

The only true voyage of discovery, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

There are optical illusions in time as well as space.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

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

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.