The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.