“There is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.”

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”

“One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself.”

“He wasn’t stupid. He’d watched enough of his friends drop like flies when the fatal illness struck.Now he was himself stricken; he showed all the Six Deadly Symptoms of a Man in Love:1) Inability to think straight.2) An alarming propensity to smile at the oddest moments.3) Constant thoughts of the object of one’s desire.4) Absolutely no interest in other members of the opposite sex.5) A startling sense of goodwill toward the world in general.6) A perpetual state of sexual arousal.”

“He who knows the masculine but keeps to the feminine,Becomes the ravine of the world.Being the ravine of the world,He dwells in constant virtue,He returns to the state of the babe.He who knows the white but keeps to the black,Becomes the model of the world.Being the model of the world,He rests in constant virtue,He returns to the infinite.He who knows glory but keeps to disgrace,Becomes the valley of the world.Being the valley of the world,He finds contentment in constant virtue,He returns to the Uncarved Block.”

“Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last forever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must be constantly won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined and good state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.”