Pascal said that if geometry stirred us emotionally as much as politics we would not be able to expound it so well. - André Maurois

Our poor bodies have strength and resources that we learn to know only when we are in the gravest situations.

Thinking is easy, said Goethe, acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world. And Tolstoy: It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice.

Faults of the mind increase with old age as do those of the features. An old man is incapable of taking up new ideas because he lacks the power to assimilate them, so he clings with crabbed tenacity to the opinions of his maturity. He pompously believes himself able to deal with any problem. Contradiction infuriates him, and he regards it as lack of respect. "In my days," he says, "we never contradicted our elders." He forgets that in his day these same words were spoken to him by his grandfather. Unable to interest himself in what is happening round him and thereby keep himself up to date, he tells stories of his past over and over again; and these are so boring to his younger listeners that they end by avoiding him altogether. Solitude is the greatest evil of old age; one by one lifelong friends and relative disappear, and they cannot be replaced. The desert widens, and death would be pleasant if its rapid approach were not so curiously threatening.