According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.