Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Optimism is the opium of the people.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.
Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue – perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.