Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding themselves.
It is now, and in this world, that we must live.
It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.
Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.
Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.
I advise the young to tell themselves constantly that most often it is up to them alone.
Not everyone can be an orphan.
From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.
True eloquence forgoes eloquence.
Whither should we aim if not towards God?
Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.
Too chaste an adolescence makes for a dissolute old age. It is doubtless easier to give up something one has known than something one imagines.
Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.
If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one’s youth, one’s greatest indignation would be for what one has become.
If only we could lean over the soul we love and see as in a mirror the image we cast!
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness.