But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

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.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

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

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.