“A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”

“For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.”

“C'est dans l'absolue ignorance de notre raison d'être qu'est la racine de notre tristesse et de nos dégoûts.”

“We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.”

“I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.”

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”

“I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference. But just because my own passions are not of that sort which burst out with violence to devastate and kill, the common mind is not aware of their existence. Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by them at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my sleep for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schöffer. And if these fierce enthusiasms are slowly being quenched in me, it is only because I am being slowly quenched myself. Our passions are ourselves. My old books are Me. I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are.”