The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

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.

Life is fired at us point blank.

Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.

All we are given is possibilities — to make ourselves one thing or another.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.