In general, Americans like to be entertained. Canadians seem more suspicious of it.
What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.
A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.
Instead of seeking new landscapes, develop new eyes.
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.
There is true freedom in letting go.
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.
Three classes inhabited the city (Alexandria in Egypt): first the Aegyptian or native stock of people, who were quick-tempered and not inclined to civil life; and secondly the mercenary class, who were severe and numerous and intractable. . . ; and, third, the tribe of the Alexandrians, who also were not distinctly inclined to civil life, and for the same reasons, but still they were better than those others, for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks.