For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.