It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

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.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.