People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them.

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Ecstasy is a glass full of tea and a piece of sugar in the mouth.

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Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.

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It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn.

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He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense. .. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.

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My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...

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Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.

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I was not born to amuse the Tsars.

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Thus people--so it seems to me-- Become good friends from sheer ennui.

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The less we love her when we woo her, The more we draw a woman in,

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