In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

That which we remember of our conduct is ignored by our closest neighbour; but that which we have forgotten having said, or even what we never said, will cause laughter even into the next world.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions