At that moment, noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its coloured edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms which in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton.
We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.
How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.
And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.
Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.
When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.