...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

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

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

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

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.