We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

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.

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.