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.

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 stellar universe is not so difficult to understand as the real actions of other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

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

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