You increase your self-respect when you feel you've done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.

The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.

Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.

A taste for simplicity cannot last for long.