The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.