"It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying."
"The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day."
"Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination."
"Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen."
"But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real point of intersection between reality and dream."
"So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!"
"She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive."
"As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past."
"I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence."
"Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable."
"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 riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation."
"I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving."
"We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so."
"One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves."
"We would like the truth to be revealed to us by novel signs, not by a sentence, a sentence similar to those which we have constantly repeated to ourselves. The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than another thought. There is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite."
"The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than any other thought."
"So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself."
"Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one's pleasure, or one's honour if the disclosure of one's pleasure runs counter to one's honour. One lies all one's life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem."
"Lies, so often misleading and which form the substance of all conversations, are less effective in covering up a feeling of dislike or of self-interest, or a visit one would rather people did not know about, or a one-day fling one wants to conceal from one's wife - than a good reputation is in utterly overshadowing disreputable habits."
"It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one."
"As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception."
"Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too that are like nightmares."
"A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture."
"I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep."
"Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands, which are about to be snatched from us! And no sooner is the danger past than we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us."