In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.