“From early youth we are accustomed to hearing falsified reports, and our minds have been saturated with prejudice for centuries, to the extent that we guard the fantastic lies like a treasure – so that in the end the truth becomes unbelievable and the lie appears to be true.”

“In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.”

“We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

“True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.”

“We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths...”