Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Lies are essential to humanity.