Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them

How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.

Mais voici qu’aujourd’hui nous avons éprouvé la soif. Et ce puits que nous connaissons, nous découvrons, aujourd’hui seulement, qu’il rayonne sure l’étendue. Une femme invisible peut enchanter ainsi toute une maison. Un puits porte loin, comme l’amour.