"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." (Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)"

"She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris."

"Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness."

"It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."

"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."

"Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."

"Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live."

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."

"My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something."

"But I don't quite understand, Father: is nobody your friend but the one that does something for you?"

"What does it all mean?' I said. 'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it."

"Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel."

"…for nothing is ever so mischievous in its own place as it is out of it;"

"I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence."

"Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means!"

"But in the meantime you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be."

"There is no way of making three men right but by making right each one of the three; but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race."

"A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician."

"I am a beast until I love as God doth love."