Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.

Every invalid is a prisoner.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?