When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you — Joseph Joubert

"Half myself mocks the other half."

"It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than what you have lost."

"History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable."

"When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it."

"I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred; that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering; that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity."

"Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name."