Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

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.

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.