The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.

When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work, but teach them longing for the wide endless sea.

I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.

The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.