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.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

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

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.