Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

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

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.)

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.