People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.
It is desire that engenders belief; if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with out own life.
The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.
We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow...
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that’s the only happy solution we can see. We don’t think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
That translucent alabaster of our memories.
And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.
But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...
May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
She’s got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.