“Hard experience of life has shown us that, generally speaking, it is inadvisable to trust too much in human nature.”

“Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good”

“Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.”

“Few things in life hurt as much as the awareness that one has betrayed the ideas of one's youth.”

“...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.”

“...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”

“We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.”