If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time - and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air.

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Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

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Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

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Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

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Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

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