We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

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.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.