Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken.

It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

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

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.