“We love only what we do not wholly possess.”

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

Truth is a point of view about things.

Desire makes everything blossom.

Sometimes in this life, under the stress of an exceptional emotion, people do say what they think.

When you work to please others you can’t succeed, but the things you do to satisfy yourself stand a chance of catching someone’s interest.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.

Dear Friend: I have nearly died three times since morning.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.

I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.

Of all the treasures a state can possess, the human lives of its citizens are for us the most precious.