At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Lies are essential to humanity.