Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

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

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.