For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature.

Translating is writing.

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.

Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.

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

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.

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.