Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.

The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.