Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.

sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.