Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.
All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.
Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.
Love is desire for knowledge.
How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny .
The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God .
We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.