"Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness."
- André Gide
"Nothing can make a face more impenetrable than the mask of kindliness."
"In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring..."
"We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us"
"The secret seemed to me much more mysterious than that; it was the secret, I thought, of one who had known death; for I moved a stranger among ordinary people, like a man who has risen from the grave,..."
"Be faithful to that which exists within yourself."
"I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of t..."
"In a world in which everyone cheats, it's the honest man who passes for a charlatan."
"She already loved me too much to see me as I was."
"When I was younger, I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresol..."