People who praise illness as bringing out the best in people ought to have their heads examined. Pain forces you to think about yourself, directs your interest to your own body and what is happening to it. You don't reach out benevolently, filled with good will for others. You don't seem to care enough. Pain makes you a little person, not a big one, and not a nice one, except perhaps in the case of saints, and I've never known one.

People don't really change. Not fundamentally. When they surprise us, it is because we failed to recognize their potentialities.

The only love from which a man never recuperates is the one he never had. The eternal and untarnished illusion.

gossip is just the small change of conversation.

Nothing is as depressing as absolute logic. Look at the maze of French politics perpetrated by a logical people.

a fair degree of literacy of speech ... is increasingly rare in politicians and not necessarily regarded as an asset.

What seems most likely is generally true.