Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.