The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

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.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.