“In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.”

How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.

I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.

Youth is a marvelous garment.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is – infinite.

I want to find something I’ve wanted all along somewhere I belong.

Work for your terrestrial life in proportion to your location in it, and work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it.

This visible world is a trace of that invisible one and the former follows the latter like a shadow.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

As the old saw says well: every end does not appear together with its beginning. It’s impossible for someone who is human to have all good things together, just as there is no single country able to provide all good things for itself.

Does money upset the hearts of learned men? He answered, “men whose hearts are changed by money are not learned.”

The soul should take care of the body, just as the pilgrim on his way to Makkah takes care of his camel; but if the pilgrim spends his whole time in feeding and adorning his camel, the caravan will leave him behind, and he will perish in the desert.