However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

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

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

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

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.