Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

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.

We believe we can change things according to our wishes because that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution; things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

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.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.