It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.

To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don't believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn't exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.