The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.

May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, as it has come for me now, when the woods are black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I do, by looking up at the sky.

The only true voyage of discovery, . . . would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.