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

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

The most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

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.