It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

A doctor who doesn't say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.