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.

Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

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

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

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.