The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to a new place; it is learning to see with new eyes.

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

Love is a reciprocal torture.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.