Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.