All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.
Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted – atrocious.
For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.
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.
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.
We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.
But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.
All the mind’s activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.