Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

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

And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

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

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.