When you work to please others you can't succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone's interest.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

I should have been happy: I wasn’t.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.