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

All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical love, so unjustifiably decried, makes everyone show, down to the least detail, all he has of goodness and self-sacrifice, so that he shines even in the eyes of those nearest to him.