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. |
Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night. |
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. |
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way |
Love is a reciprocal torture. |
Love is space and time measured by the heart. |
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? |
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. |
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. |
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees |
Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey. |
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things |
Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. |
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals |