Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.Collection: Women
We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.Collection: Moving
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.Collection: Alone
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.Collection: Sympathy
Love is space and time measured by the heart.Collection: Love
Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.Collection: Happiness
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.Collection: Science
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.Collection: Knowledge
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.Collection: Art
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.Collection: Time
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.Collection: Truth
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.Collection: Time
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.Collection: Medical
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.Collection: Friendship
We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.Collection: Wisdom
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.Collection: Change
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.Collection: Strength
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.Collection: Chance
Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.Collection: Intelligence
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.Collection: Travel
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.Collection: Alone
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.
The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.
The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.