An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

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.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.