We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

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

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

The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.

Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.

Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.