The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.
Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.
The real stars of society are tired of appearing there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another hemisphere, where they are more or less alone.
In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.
I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.
Love is a reciprocal torture.
Conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.