A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

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

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?