If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie

We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.

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.