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.

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

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.

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

The stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.