Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
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.
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
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.
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.
I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...
...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..
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 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 only true paradise is paradise lost
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.
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.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion
Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.
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.
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.
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
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.
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.
It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
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.
The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation
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.
With one image he would make that beauty explode into me.
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
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.
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.
Mystery is not about traveling to new places but about looking with new eyes.
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
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 must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.
But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.
...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul.
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.
There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed," the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.
Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.
Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.
In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.
Fall in love with a dog's bum, And thou'll think it pretty as a plum.
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.
Love is a reciprocal torture.
Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.
Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
The remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
 dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden. ){kind=small}
Hoeveel bedroevender nog dan vroeger vond ik het sedert die dag (...) dat ik geen aanleg voor schrijven had en ervan moest afzien ooit een beroemde schrijver te worden.
A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.
I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.
The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
Every person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance is a new creation, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.
My dear Madame, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.
