[Books] will visit you at your convenience, whether you are lonesome or not, on rainy days or fair. They propose themselves as either transient acquaintances or permanent friends. They will stay as long as you like, departing or returning as you wish. Their friendship entails no obligation. Best of all, and not always true of our merely human friends, they have Cleopatra's infinite variety.

To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.