The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.
The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
We become moral when we are unhappy.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody’s opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.
When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.
No man is a complete mystery except to himself.
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.
We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.