However, the danger in [socially unbalanced relationships] is that the subjection of the woman temporarily calms the man's jealousy but also renders ….

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect..

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more….

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tone….

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our dispos….

Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us..

Le temps qui change les e" tres ne modifie pas l'image que nous avons garde e d'eux. Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we ha….

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hi….

We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account to-day, with wh….

La me decine a fait quelques petits progre' s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie' re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, s….

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their ric….

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals..

I should have been happy: I wasn’t..

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things..

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness..

I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they….

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body..

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness..

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self..

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves..

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility o….