A veces estamos demasiado dispuestos a creer que el presente es el ΓΊnico estado posible de las cosas.
The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
