Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

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.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.