Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

Nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them.

Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow.

When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Whose inferiority proclaimed her own supremacy so loud.

Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

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 compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Truth is a point of view about things.

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.

That translucent alabaster of our memories.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!