“Romantic haste in drama bringstears and sighs when the hero diesbut the curtain fall is finalwhen in life we take the tragic wayThe sunset too is a glorious thingbut with it ends the day.”

“Though all the guns be silenced,each soldier in his home,There is no peace till Love comes,till the meek may safely roam.”

“Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the days drew near me,A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,Again I took in my hands a letter,And I read and reread till the light was gone.And melancholy, I came out on the balconyCame out to change my thoughts at least by looking atA little of the city that I loved,A little movement on the street and in the shops.Translated by Rae Dalven”

“Days to come stand in front of uslike a row of lighted candles—golden, warm, and vivid candles. Days gone by fall behind us,a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;the nearest are smoking still,cold, melted, and bent. I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me,and it saddens me to remember their original light.I look ahead at my lighted candles. I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified,how quickly that dark line gets longer,how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate.”

“What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have that right.”

“The division of our culture is making us more obtuse than we need be: we can repair communications to some extent: but, as I have said before, we are not going to turn out men and women who understand as much of their world as Piero della Francesca did of his, or Pascal, or Goethe. With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of the imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once seen, cannot be denied.”

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”