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.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

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

Love is a reciprocal torture.

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

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.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

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

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

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.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

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

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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

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.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

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.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

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.

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

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

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

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

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

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.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.