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.

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.

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

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

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

...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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

The only true paradise is paradise lost

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

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.