Quotes

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

A truth which is clearly understood can no longer be written with sincerity.

In a way, the greatest praise of God is his denial by the atheist who thinks creation is so perfect it does not need a creator.

Happiness is good for the body but sorrow strengthens the spirit.

A cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer's leap never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.

People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are necessary for the pursuit.

We find a little of everything in our memory. It is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory in which chance guides our hand now to a calming drug and now to a dangerous poison.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

The one thing more difficult than following our regimen is keeping from imposing it on others.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

The only true paradises are the paradises we have lost.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.

Remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time.

Love is space and time made tender to the heart.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed. To kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.

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.

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

By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon.

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.