Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

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

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

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.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.