- Leisure moments: each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live.
- It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
- There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.
- The world is big ... May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
- Passion satisfied has its innocence, almost as fragile as any other.
- The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.
- The unfortunate thing is that, because wishes sometimes come true, the agony of hoping is perpetuated.
- To have merit to abstain from a fault, is a manner to be guilty.
- Our defects are sometimes the better adversaries when we oppose our vices.
- Every silence is composed of nothing but unspoken words. Perhaps that is why I became a musician. Someone had to express this silence, make it render up all the sadness it contained, make it sing as it were. Someone had to use not words, which are always too precise not to be cruel, but simply music.
- I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
- One must not fear the words anymore when one consented to the things.
- The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.
- All would have transformed us if we had the courage to be what we are.
- A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
- We believe ourselves pure as long as we despise what we do not desire.
- Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.
- More civilized ways of living and more liberal thinking in the course of the last century are the work of a very small minority of good minds; the masses remain wholly ignorant, fierce and cruel when they can be so, and in any case limited and selfish; it is safe to wager that they will never change. Our effort has been compromised in advance by too many greedy procurators and publicans, too many suspicious senators, too many brutal centurions. Nor is time granted oftener to empires than to men to learn from past errors. Although a weaver would wish to mend his web or a clever calculator would correct his mistakes, and the artist would try to retouch his masterpiece if still imperfect or slightly damaged, Nature prefers to start again from the very clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order.
- The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books.
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