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.

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

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.