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.

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

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.