When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child we were and the souls of the dead from whom we have sprung come to lavish on us their riches and their spells.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.

However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders it more demanding. He ends up making his mistress live like those prisoners on whom light is shone day and night in order for them to be better watched. And things always end in tragedy.

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.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.