"One’s education must first of all be directed to a thorough knowledge of the classics and an understanding of the teachings of the sages."

"Liberal education is literate education of a certain kind: some sort of education in letters or through letters."

"Balzac realised even from the early volumes the particular quality of Stendhal’s intelligence and his mastery of psychology."

"For the king and lord Osiris, they represent by an eye and a sceptre, and some even interpret the name as "Many-eyed"."

"Mankind is divided into three classes: Lovers of wealth; lovers of honour, and lovers of wisdom ; this last, being highest."

"The inaccessibility of the ends of the rainbow has encouraged the growth of countless legends."

"What Epicurus, who never travelled except when he was banished, sought in his own garden, our tourists seek abroad."

"My own sensibility reacts but little externally. It is occupied either by confused inward impressions, or by the ideas which strike me."

"Nothing could be more chimerical than the notion that Man is the same thing as the Economic Man."

"Maupassant's renown is universal, but his popularity is restricted. It is not difficult to perceive why."

"Nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man."

"Initiatory death signifies the end at once of childhood, of ignorance, and of the profane condition."

"The archdemon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that ingathering which religious experience demands."

"For what did Don Quixote fight ? For Dulcinea, for glory, for life, for survival. "

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play."

"Going mad is the slowest and dullest business in the world."

"The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature..."

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not.

"No less remarkable than Balzac’s genius as a writer was his lack of aptitude for the role of society lion."

"In our day, it is difficult to imagine a world in which everybody, high and low, educated and uneducated, was preoccupied with comets,"

"America is a man-made world; moreover it is a world which man has made by means of machinery."

"The present age is an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity."

"Let us take a day in Balzac’s working life, a day typical of thousands."

"As Otto Rank remarked, the neurotic is the “artiste manqué,” the artist who cannot transmute his conflicts into art."