Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit..

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves..

It's odd how a person always arouses admiration for his moral qualities among the relatives of another with whom he has sexual relations. Physical lo….

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

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, find….

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love..

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind..

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others..

Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a m….

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 soothi….

That translucent alabaster of our memories..

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions.

A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed….

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind..

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compos….

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction….

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….

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination..

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure..

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

Not caring for their lives' is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers….