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

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.

In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.

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

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.