To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.

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.

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.