No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

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

Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

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

Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.

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