No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.

Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive.