No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

Death is in truth an illness from which we recover

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.