We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.

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.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.