The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.