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.
Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
...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.
Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.
In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
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.
Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck." [On Water]
Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.
The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.
Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments." [On Water]
I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?
To avoid each other, their eyes had developed an amazing mobility with all the cunning of enemies fearful of meeting each other head on.
The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.
Une vie! Quelques jours et puis plus rien! On naît, on grandit, on est heureux, on attend, puis on meurt.
I hope you realize that you really hit it off with the ladies? You must cultivate that. It could take you far.
The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.
Every authentically loved being is a kind of god.
She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.
Military men are the scourges of the world.
Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance.
The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master. [Mademoiselle Cocotte]
But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?
I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.
They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.
Put black on white.
It was one of those feminine faces whose every line has its own particular charm, and seems to possess a meaning, whose every movement seems to reveal or to conceal something.
At times it seemed to her that other people's hearts must have arms like their bodies, loving arms extended to clasp and hold— and her own heart? All it had was eyes, that heart of hers.
She was pretty and, even more, she was smart, and she had a divine figure according to all accounts. He fell in love with her, as a man always falls in love with any attractive woman whom he sees a lot of.
Charming, charming,' the lawyer said at intervals.
Our senses are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature a harmony
But she shook with rage, and got up one of those conjugal scenes which make a peaceable man dread the domestic hearth more than a battlefield where bullets are raining.
Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels.
