But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.

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

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

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

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

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.

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

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.

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

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

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

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

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

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

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

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

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

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

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

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

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

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

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.

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

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.

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.

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

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.

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