“Those are nearer to reality who can deal with it light-heartedly, because they know it to be inexhaustible.”

“Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they areThose who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken wordsThose who crowd in my path do not know that I am walking alone with youThose who love me do not know that their love brings you to my heart”

“Women are divided into two categories: those who can deal with the men they are in love with, and those who cannot. Sophia was one of those who can.”

“Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality.”

“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.”

“Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects— that machine, there, for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me— I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.”