It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.

When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?