For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.