In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world

Hating someone is feeling irritation by their mere existence.