“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?”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“expect nothing from the future”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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