The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.
Love is space and time measured by the heart.
The only paradise is paradise lost.
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
Love is a reciprocal torture.