Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

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.

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

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.