People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

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