In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, “What are her surroundings? What has been her life? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.

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.

We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves.

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit.

Neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength – we are able in the end to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can take for us, that no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.