We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."