emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.