Music and love are the only accomplishments of humanity which do not, in an absolute sense, have to be called attempts with unsuitable means.

Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.

Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.

In the immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the connected, or connect the separate.

For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.

Gratitude, as it were, is the moral memory of mankind. In this respect, it differs from faithfulness by being more practical and impulsive: although it may remain, of course, something purely internal, it may yet engender new actions. It is an ideal bridge which the soul comes across again and again, so to speak, and which, upon provocations too slight to throw a new bridge to the other person, it uses to come closer to him.

On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.