"Conversation. — Because they have many of those ideas that, to be shown, have need of eyes, gestures, voice, a whole multitude of signs that the written word does not accompany. One sees the soul in operation."

"We must try, as much as possible, not to mistrust anyone."

"My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build."

"Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose."

"Thoughts that are light, clear, distinct, finished; and words that resemble their thoughts. Words that often retain their meaning even when they are detached from others and that please when isolated as sounds."

"For simple light is perhaps still more beautiful than colors."

"Glory. Lovelier to desire than to possess."

"I know too well what I am going to say. I know it too well before writing."

"It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas."

"In the same way crimes have increased laws, errors have increased explanations."

"Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours."

"All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said."

"They want to shake up the world, not make it wiser."

"The time I once lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering."

"When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do."

"Enter oneself (we say). When one enters oneself, one sees God."

"For in spite of ourselves we respect those whom we see respected."

"There is nothing serious in civil life except good and evil, vice and virtue. Everything else in it should be a game."

"Once we have tasted the juice of words, our mind can no longer pass them by. We drink thought from them."

"To see the world means judging the judges."

"Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering: "One would like to breathe for him.""

"The voice is an aid to intelligence."

"Misery is almost always the result of thinking."

"They speak to the ear. I want to speak to the memory."

"A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve."

"The child speaks words with his memory long before he speaks them with his tongue."

"Everything that is exact is short."

"Because they know all the words, they think they know all the truths."

"There are many situations in life that we suddenly feel we have seen in dreams."

"All beautiful words are susceptible to more than one meaning (or signification)."

"Fear feeds the imagination."

"The phrase, "One dies before one has lived.""

"Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public."

"The truth by way of illusion."

""But he doesn't finish his sentences," (he said). And they don't finish their thoughts. — To finish their thoughts. — To finish one's thought! It is a long process, it is rare. It gives intense pleasure. Because every finished thought easily enters the mind. They don't have the same need to be beautiful in order to please. It is enough for them to be finished. The situation of the soul that has had such thoughts communicates itself to other souls and transfers its repose to them."

"If I weigh myself down, everything is lost."

"To seek the truth. But, as you are seeking and as you are waiting, what will you do, what will you think, what will you practice, what rules will you follow?"

"Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose for a friend if she were a man."

"A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball."

"We are all old children, more or less serious, more or less filled with ourselves."

"Objects must be described only in order to describe the feelings they envoke in us."

"I have not seen you since, but you have often appeared to me in my dreams."

"What will you think of pleasures when you no longer enjoy them?"

"The imagination is an eye where images remain forever."

"To know: it is to see inside oneself."

"Perhaps (and probably) it would be true to say that we cannot conceive of anything except what we can see in our minds."