All happiness is a form of innocence.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.