It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.