Every kiss provokes another. Oh, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring to life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: 'No, this evening I shan't be free'.

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. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.