Love is wiser than wisdom.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.