Fashions, being themselves begotten of the desire for change, are quick to change also.
Le bonheur est dans l’amour un e tat anormal. In love, happiness is abnormal.
So long as I know what’s boiling in my pot I don’t bother my head about what’s in other people’s.
For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.
What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?
Existence is of little interest save on days when the dust of realities is mingled with magic sand.
Certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.
We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people’s views are never in accordance with our own.
If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people.
Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.
We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.
Nous sommes tous oblige s, pour rendre la re alite supportable, d’entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.
La possession de ce qu’on aime est une joie plus grande encore que l’amour. Possessing what one loves is an even greater joy than love itself.
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.
Lies are essential to humanity.
Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.
We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.
I should have been happy: I wasn’t.
L’ide e qu’on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l’ide e qu’un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.