The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.