What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.

The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

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.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.