with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like being astonished that anyone should condescend to die of cholera at the bidding of so insignificant a creature as the comma bacillus.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.