The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.
To us, men of the West, a very strange thing is the poetry of the East; it has neither subject nor object.
To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
