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.

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface...but is a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating...a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.