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

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

Speech is civilization itself.

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.