A human being – what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within...

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a...

I told myself: ‘I am surrounded by unknown things.’ I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he...

Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.

We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the...

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of...

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it,...

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to...

Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it… It’s horrible… I shall see nothing more… nothing of what exists… the smallest objects that we use… glasses… plates…...

Life is a slope. As long as you’re going up you’re always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death...

Bientôt la conversation reprit entre les trois dames, que la présence de cette fille avait rendues subitement amies, presque intimes. Elles devaient faire, leur semblait-il, comme un faisceau de leurs dignités d’épouses en face de...

I told myself ‘Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die....

She thought constantly about Paris and avidly read all the society pages in the papers. Their accounts of receptions, celebrations, the clothes worn, and all the accompanying delights enjoyed, whetted her appetite still further. Above...

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of...

Ces six personnes formaient le fond de la voiture, le côté de la société rentée, sereine et forte, des honnêtes gens autorisés qui ont de la Religion et des Principes.

Get married, my friend, you don’t know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It...

Charming, charming,’ the lawyer said at intervals.

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren’t there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or...

The only certainty is death.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

Entre pauvres gens, faut bien qu’on s’aide … C’est les grands qui font la guerre.

But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?

A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.

It was then between one o’clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds – that sad crescent...

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.

Les vases du fleuve ensevelissaient ces vengeances obscures, sauvages et légitimes, héroïsmes inconnus, attaques muettes, plus périlleuses que les batailles au grand jour et sans le retentissement de la gloire.Car la haine de l’Étranger arme...

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses – with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or...

Military men are the scourges of the world.

In fact living is dying.

I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.

…A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

Un rideau de flocons blancs ininterrompu miroitait sans cesse en descendant vers la terre; il effaçait les formes, poudrait les choses d’une mousse de glace; et l’on n’entendait plus, dans le grand silence de la...

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and...

Elle se sentait en même temps indignée contre tous ses voisins, et humiliée d’avoir cedé, souillée par les baisers de ce Prussien entre les bras duquel on l’avait hypocritement jetée.

Every authentically loved being is a kind of god.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she...

She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

Elle se sentait noyée dans le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes qui l’avaient sacrifiée d’abord, rejetée ensuite, comme une chose malpropre et inutile.

Get black on white.

It is love that is sacred,” she said.” Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing...