A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from anyone… Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.