- Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon your errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has hardened, and naught in you will even quake the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that inhabited you in the beginning.
- Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it may prevent us from thinking very often of one another, but we know that our comrades are somewhere "out there--"where, one can hardly say--silent, forgotten but deeply faithful... for nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle having planted an acorn in the morning to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.
- What saves a man is to take a step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
- Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, the terror becomes the known.
- ...do you know, I'd like to spade and spade. It's beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who will prune my trees when I am gone?
- He was as simple minded as a child trying to empty the sea with the aid of a teacup
- It seems to me that those who complain of man's progress confuse ends with means.
aug 18 2010 ∞
feb 1 2014 +
feb 1 2014 +