Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.
People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.
Until I saw Chardin's painting I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house in the half-cleared table in the corner of a tablecloth left awry in the knife beside the empty o...
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of...
Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknow...
They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people - and this had been my case since youth - for wh...
There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurt...
There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel. [...] I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.
One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.
Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the compl...
I loved her [Gilberte]; I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. I thought her so beautiful that I should have liked...
Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little b...
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
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 favourite book.
So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead beca...
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
وأدركتُ المجال الذى يصطدم به الحب، إننا نتخيل كموضوع له، كائناً يمكن أن يتمدّد أمامنا، منغلقاً ضمن جسد، يا للحسرة، ان امتداد هذا الكائن إلى كل النقط فى الزمان والمكان هو ما شغله ويشغله. وإن لم نتملك ص...
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.