Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.
The only certainty is death.
In fact living is dying.
Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.
It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.
I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing
And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.
You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched." [My Uncle Sosthenes]
Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.
We love our mother unknowingly, and only realize how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation.
Get black on white.
You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
