A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it...
Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.
The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.
It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.