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

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

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

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.