My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved.
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.
The best vaccine against anger is to watch others in its throes.
Every person whom we love, indeed to a certain extent every person is to us like Janus, presenting to us the face that we like if that person leaves us, the repellent face if we know him or her to be perpetually at our disposal.
A little tap on the window pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.
Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own.
A ‘sadist’ of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...
Perhaps she would not have thought of wickedness as a state so rare, so abnormal, so exotic, one which it was so refreshing to visit, had she been able to distinguish in herself, as in all her fellow-men and women, that indifference to the sufferings which they cause which, whatever names else be given it, is the one true, terrible and lasting form of cruelty.
Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it.
I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel filled with you.
And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream.
I thought nothing at all, but I felt an immense sadness, as when two parts of one’s past existence, which have been anchored near to one, and upon which one has perhaps been basing idly from day to day an unacknowledged hope, remove themselves finally, with a joyous flapping of pennants, for unknown destinations, like a pair of ships. As.
For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.
There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares.
It is the same in life: the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune, but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination, for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that even if we are able to distinguish successively each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
It is false to believe that the scale of fears corresponds to that of the dangers which inspire them. One might be frightened of sleeplessness and yet not of a duel, of a rat and not of a lion.
A well-read man will yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new “good book,” as he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books he has read, whereas a good book is something special, unforeseeable, made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it.
No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one’s books, will not exist. Eternal duration is no more promised to books than it is to men.
Only that issues from ourselves which we ourselves extract from the darkness within ourselves and which is unknown to others.