The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.

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

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

We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.