Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.
All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy...
People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.
For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to me...
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 the rest.
And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a drea...
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.
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the dir...
Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in...
Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.
All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enri...
We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes...
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished...