“...when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us”

“Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?”

“For he used to say...that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”

“Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.”

“Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to befree. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinitefrom life?”

“Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.”

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”