Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.