It is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them.
The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.
Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.
How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory.
Photography is the product of complete alienation.
We love only what we do not wholly possess.
You can’t learn the truth about a man’s intentions by asking him.
We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.
The only possible paradises are those we have lost.
Masterpieces are no more than the shipwrecked flotsam of great minds.
Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.
We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
A man may have spent his life among the great ones of the earth, who to him have been merely boring relatives or tedious acquaintances because a familiarity engendered in the cradle had stripped them of all glamour in his eyes.