The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

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

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.