We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

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.

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

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

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.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

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.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

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 bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

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.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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

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.

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.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

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.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

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

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.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.