The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

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.

When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address.