“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.”

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

“When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.”

“It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.”

“It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.”

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.”