"Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live."

"How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?"

"We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it."

"There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children."

"The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten."

"In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex)."

"Narrating incredible things as though they were real—old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible—the new."

"When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end."

"The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire."

"There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him."

"Love is desire for knowledge."

"In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid."

"Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time."

"When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her."

"No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him."

"A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself."

"We obtain things when we no longer want them."

"Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed."

"Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own."

"There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first."

"The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown."

"A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work."

"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace."

"We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word."

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

"Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven."

"A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end."

"Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always."

"If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!"

"In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities."

"Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free."

"Love is the cheapest of religions."

"We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites."

"War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values."

"The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others."

"No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern."

"The most banal thing, discovered in ourselves, becomes intensely interesting. It is no longer an abstract banality, but an amazing co-ordination between reality and our own individuality."

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

"When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

"What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her."

"I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company."

"Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man."

"Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality."

"It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it."

"It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her."

"You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering."