How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. But the tremendous effort needed- one doesn't always want to make it-does one? ... But what else can be done? What's the alternative? What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.

Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.

I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.