The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Similarly the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is most brilliant, or their culture broadest, but those who have had the power, ceasing in a moment to live only for themselves, to make use of their personality as of a mirror.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for future desires.