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

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

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

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

There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.