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

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

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.

It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in us through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist was in understanding that, in the apparatus of our emotions, since the image is the only essential element, the simplification which consists of purely and simply suppressing the factual characters is a definitive improvement.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.