We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.