"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."

"The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."

"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

"What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful."

"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it."

"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."

""Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. "Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."

"Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition — the same motif appears at the beginning and the end — may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. … But it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo."

"For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting."

"No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate."

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself."

"It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it."

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?"

"Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us."

"He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them."

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress."

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

"To love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

"Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."

"Pour les hommes, dites-vous vous-même, l'infidélité n'est pas l'inconstance."

"Le ridicule qu’on a augmente toujours en proportion qu’on s’en défend."

"L’homme jouit du bonheur qu’il ressent, et la femme de celui qu’elle procure. Cette différence, si essentielle et si peu remarquée, influe pourtant, d'une manière bien sensible, sur la totalité de leur conduite respective. Le plaisir de l’un est de satisfaire des désirs, celui de l’autre est surtout de les faire naître."

"Ou vous avez un rival ou vous n'en n'avez pas. Si vous en avez un, il faut plaire pour lui être préféré; si vous n'en n'avez pas, il faut encore plaire pour éviter d'en avoir."

"Une main occupée pour la force, l'autre pour l'amour, quel orateur pourrait prétendre à la grâce en pareille situation?"

"Le luxe absorbe tout: on le blâme, mais il faut l'imiter; et le superflu finit par priver du nécessaire."

"On n'est heureux que par l'amour."

"La honte que cause l’amour est comme sa douleur: on ne l’éprouve qu’une fois. On peut encore la feindre après; mais on ne la sent plus. Cependant le plaisir reste, et c’est bien quelque chose."

"J’ai été étonné du plaisir qu’on éprouve en faisant le bien."

"Le scélérat a ses vertus, comme l'honnête homme a ses faiblesses."

"L'amour est, comme la médecine, seulement l'art d'aider à la nature."

"Une occasion manquée se retrouve, tandis qu’on ne revient jamais d’une démarche précipitée."

"On a toujours assez vécu, quand on a eu le temps d’acquérir l’amour des femmes et l’estime des hommes."

"La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid."

"On peut citer de mauvais vers, quand ils sont d'un grand poète."

"Le succès, qui ne prouve pas toujours le mérite, tient souvent davantage au choix du sujet qu’à son exécution."

"There is perhaps too much freedom in Protestantism to satisfy a certain religious austerity, which may seize upon the man who is overwhelmed by great misfortunes; sometimes even in the habitual course of life, the reality of this world disappears all at once, and we feel ourselves in the middle of its interests as we should at a ball, where we did not hear the music; the dancing that we saw there would appear insane."