They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high as we had hoped.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.