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.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals... is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

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

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.