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. Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things. Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying. Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond. Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Love is a reciprocal torture. All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things. Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees. A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

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. Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees. What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit. 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. People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others. We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

Love is space and time measured by the heart. People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. We become moral when we are unhappy. Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused. We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full. A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it. The only paradise is paradise lost.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments. Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness. People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad. Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us. The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind. Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey. It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. 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. 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. Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true. For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing. 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.
Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.