We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
Why, I have never anything to do. I am always free, and I always will be free if you wantme.
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.
You can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it.
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.
It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.
The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.