“To be free of customs: “Custom clouds the true face of things”.”

“He has no defined destination. All roads are open to his “pensée vagabonde”.”

“He is only a philosopher in the manner of Socrates, whom he revered above all others because he left behind no dogma, no teachings, no law, no system, only an example: the man who seeks himself in all and who seeks all in himself.”

“What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him.”

“He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.”

“But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secretes, showing where it's dishonesty commits a crime against nature.”

“The writer in him is only the shadow of the man, though so often we observe men whose art of writing is so great, but whose art of living is so modest.”

“I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.”

“He desires only to preserve a few memories, assemble a few thoughts, to dream more than live and patiently await death, calmly preparing for it.”

“He makes it his task to be wholly sincere with himself, and he notes this definition of wisdom which he finds in Pindar: “True being is the beginning of a great virtue.”

“He becomes an auto-psychologist. “What do I know?” he asks himself.”

“For you cannot know the world by just navel-gazing. This is why he reads history and studies philosophy: not to draw lessons and precepts, but to understand how other men have acted in the past, so that he can compare his own situation with theirs.”

“He studies virtues, vices, flaws and merits, the wisdom and puerility of others.”

“Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.”

“expect nothing from the future”

“The true essence of freedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.”

“It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?”

“to see passion in every crime, and use that passion to excuse it.”

“..and there’s no point in a life lived aimlessly.”

“For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.”

“But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars, did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. However far I went from Europe, its fate came with me.”

“But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.”

“Its radiant glow seemed much lighter and happier than this northern sky of eternal grey cloud.”

“Once a man has found himself, there is nothing in this world that he can lose.”

“How to remain free? How to preserve the incorruptible lucidity of my spirit faced with all the threats and dangers of sectarian turmoil?”

“dreams are like delicate little white flowers that will be blown away at the first breath of reality?”

“How to escape the tyrannical demands that the state and Church seek to impose on me? How to protect that unique part of my soul against enforced submission to rules and measures dictated from outside?”

“How to safeguard the deepest region of my spirit and its matter which belongs to me alone, my body, my health, my thoughts, my feelings, from the danger of being sacrificed to the deranged prejudices of others, to serve interests which are not my own?”

“He has the sense that up to this moment his life has been a sham; he yearns to live properly, to reflect deeply and ruminate. And it is among his books he hopes to find the solution to the eternal problem of “life and death”.”

“Her words came tumbling out in pursuit of the images hurrying through her mind.”

“intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In”

“That is to say, I went in search of every moment I had spent with him. ..."

“There is always a mysterious conflict in every artist; if life treats him roughly he longs for peace and calm, but if he comes into safe harbour he longs to be back in the turmoil.”

“Only he knows that no task on earth is more burdensome and difficult than to maintain one’s intellectual and moral independence and preserve it unsullied through a mass cataclysm.”

“..pain is cowardly, it gives way before the overpowering will to live which seems to cling more strongly to our flesh than all the mortal suffering of the spirit."..”

“For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.”

“pain is cowardly, it gives way before the overpowering will to live which seems to cling more strongly to our flesh than all the mortal suffering of the spirit.”

“Nothing was done to us - we were simply placed in a complete void, and everyone knows that nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.”

“It’s not your fault. But whose fault is it? Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap.”

“To know by heart is not to know, it is to keep what they have given you and store it in your memory.”

“I had no witness against me left but my own memory."..”

“..Growing old, after all, means that one no longer fears the past."..”

“With secret envy Christine thought: If only I could go back to taking pleasure in such little things, instead of yearning for the impossible.”

“War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.”

“Come tutte le nature caparbie non aveva il senso del ridicolo.”

“The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don’t, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it—”

“This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.”

“Poverty was crushing all the feeling they had. It was intolerable to be together this way, and yet they tolerated it.”

“The strikingly broad, almost athletically powerful shoulders unfortunately reflected the character of his playing too, for this Mr. McConnor was one of those self-obsessed big wheels who feel personally diminished by a defeat in even the most trivial game.”

“See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.”