Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

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

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