Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.