A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.