There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

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.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.