The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations. - Marcel Proust

Like everyone who possesses something precious in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts, a new state which it was impossible to foresee in the old.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside - they did not produce our beliefs, there, they do not destroy them.

Les traits de notre visage ne sont guère que des gestes devenus, par l'habitude, définitifs.