You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.

If a bell failed to ring, if a stove smoked, if a wheel on a machine stuck, you knew at once where to look and did so with alacrity; you found the defect and knew how to cure it. But the thing within you, the secret mainspring that alone gave meaning to life, the thing within us that alone is living, alone is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, of craving happiness and experiencing it- that was unknown. You knew nothing about that, nothing at all, and if the mainspring failed there was no cure. Wasn't it insane?

Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.

All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.

Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action.

. . . gentleness is stronger than severity, water is stronger than rock, love is stronger than force.

Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding.