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….

Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts whe….

People who, not being in love themselves, feel that a clever man should only be unhappy about a person who is worth his while; which is rather like b….

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for..

Lies are essential to humanity..

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates..

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. B….

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there..

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind..

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time….

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time..

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict ….

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment..

Love is an incurable malady like those pathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform h….

A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed..

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silen….

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change..

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain patho….

A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, ….

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the ….

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favo….