This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

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

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

Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.