Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

We must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.