As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

A certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.