All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination.

I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

It's no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, a hoplite.

Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep.

Excuse me ... but I reject your definitions of me.

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.