We love only what we do not wholly possess.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.