“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”

“What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention ... How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?”

“I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among them, striving to see all things just as I see them at this very moment. I then placed Wisdom in the eternal station which now is ours. But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all.”

“We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.”

“By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death.”

“What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.”

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”