Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!