We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

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

You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.