But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.
The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.
Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn’t I have changed a trifle?
I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time’s toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.
Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken atwill from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.
The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.
Patriotism is the religion of hell.
There is no gift more great than love.
Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.
In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?
There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.
As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.
What am I that I am called upon to have prejudices concerning the universe?
Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .
Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.
I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.
In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.
The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills – and as immortal.