“The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.”

My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.

You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.

In this world everything that is won to the ideal, is an eternal (or imperishable, – “impérissable”, Fr.) good.

The very words he uses are designed to awaken in them a new sense: the sense of the eternal.

However brief and close to the earth his words sound, they echo throughout infinite eternity and permeate the faith of his followers with their eternal content.

It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

I have an official record. I have the Word of God: “These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God: that ye may know that ye have eternal life.”

No mind, no wisdom–tempora ry mind, temporary wisdom–eternal mind, eternal wisdom.

To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

To sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.