Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible. Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit. We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen. People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground. The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. The true paradises are the lost paradises. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. | 
