Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

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

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no longer concerned with them that, suddenly, as a result of work coming from elsewhere, accomplished within the one who did not love him, these barriers, formerly attacked without success, fall futilely.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.