I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.

There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.