Even the simple act that we call "going to visit a person of our acquaintance" is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

Let a prize lower my position, if it causes me to be read; that I prefer immediately to all the honors.

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.