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

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.