Translating is writing.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily

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

Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.

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

All happiness is a form of innocence.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.