We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.