Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact. Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.