Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.
Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.
Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.
Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.
We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.
One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one’s eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.
When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.
I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one’s family traits become.
Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.
As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the Universe had appeared to me more interesting.
Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.
According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.