It is a mistake, " Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune.

With women who do not love us, as with the "dear departed, " the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.

...but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty.

M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.

...for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.

Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?

Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...

Talent is unfair and undemocratic

Evils draw men together.

Television is a young person's medium.

The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters.

There is an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness inside each one of us.

[Lord Brougham's writings on the bee's cell contain] as striking examples of bad reasoning as are often to be met with in writings related to mathematical subjects.

The future belongs to freedom, not to fear.

Slavery is what slavery's always been: About one person controlling another person using violence and then exploiting them economically, paying them nothing. That's what slavery's about

The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other; it is a perpetual exercise in mortification.