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

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.