Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.