It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
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.
Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
There’s nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one’s mind.
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.