"There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth."

"When Narcissus died, the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears."

"If someone asked me what I deserve, I would say in all honesty before God that I deserve hard labor. Not because of Tiflis, however..."

"The truly gifted always remain in obscurity amongst the crowd and shun as much as possible the display of their talents."

[Text] "Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, who had been for three months apprenticed to Alyahin the shoemaker, was sitting up on Christmas Eve..."

"A group of pleasant people in idyllic surroundings, hopelessly at odds with themselves and with one another."

"- Gentlemen, I stake two million !" "- Agreed ! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom !" said the young man."

[Paintings) “I haven’t been able to restrain myself from painting, so beautiful are the motifs that surround my garden.” Camille Pissarro

[Letters] "O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy..."

“Nights, through dreams, tell the myths forgotten by the day.”

[Focus] "Thoth, the "excellent of understanding", observed and wrote down everything that happened and reported it to Ra every morning."

[Essay] "Birds are naturally the most joyful creatures in the world...."

"Our regeneration depends on an 'ultraphilosophy' that brings us closer to nature by exploring the entirety and the interior of things."

"... the old master to whom one might well apply the words he himself used to describe Pissarro: humble and colossal."

"After you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books."

[Quotations] "I believe that we are on earth for this purpose, for contemplating and searching and listening for lost remote sounds..."

"One of my mental complications — horrible beyond words — is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity."

”What one takes from this biography is a sense of a man who wanted simultaneously to be no one and to be everyone."

"However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors."

"Cant, guile, hypocrisy, front, face, playing a game, trying to impress in conventional ways: these are all absent in themselves."

"Every person is, in part, 'his own project', and makes himself."

"The only real science is the knowledge of how a person should live his life. And this knowledge is open to everyone."

[Essay] "If one were to compile a list of modernist authors, ... chances are quite good that the authors selected would be insomniacs."