The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

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

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.