The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits become.

For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.