I had come in time to learn that it was a mistake to smile a friendly smile when somebody made a fool of me.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!