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.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.