Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.