Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...

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.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The only true paradise is paradise lost

The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.

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 charms of a passing woman are usually in direct relation to the speed of her passing.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

Our desires interweave with one another; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it.

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

With one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation

In my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

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.

Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.

And then, gradually, the memory of her would fade away, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.