There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.