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

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.