Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.