Understanding is the beginning of approving.
In other people’s company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...
Man: The most complex of beings, and thus the most dependent of beings. On all that made you up, you depend.
Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.
The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.
I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.
He who wants a rose must respect its thorn.
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.
The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one’s own would be a sorry limitation.
Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.
I can’t expect others to share my virtues. It’s good enough for me if they share my vices.
I prefer granting with a good grace what I know I shan’t be able to prevent.
They establish distinctions and reserves which I cannot apply to myself, for I exist only as a whole; my only claim is to be natural, and the pleasure I feel in an action, I take as a sign that I ought to do it.
A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned.
The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death’s reach.
Long only for what you have.
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.