Love is a reciprocal torture.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.