To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.