We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.