A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

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.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

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

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.