Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time.

Le veritable voyage de decouverte ne consiste pas a chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais a avoir de nouveaux yeux. (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.)

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.