The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

To be a complete victim may be another source of power.

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.