All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.

Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.

The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily