It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

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

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

When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

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