“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?

A light here required a shadow there.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

I am rooted, but I flow.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

Power acquired by guilt was never used for a good purpose.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older, life is totally about losing everything.

A man can get something from war that is impossible to acquire any place else.

A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.