People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. |
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the comma bacillus. |
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. |
That translucent alabaster of our memories. |
The ''sensitiveness'' claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves. |
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. |
The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. |
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. |
The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter |
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. |
The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which have become permanent |
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity |
The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves. |
The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome. |
The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train. |