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

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.

It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.

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.

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.