The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

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

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

Knowing does not always allow us to prevent, but at least the things that we know, we hold them, if not in our hands, but at leastin our thoughts where we may dispose of them at our whim, which gives us the illusion of power over them.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.