After these conversations with Tagore some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.

I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document — a letter, for instance — had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.

Before commencing this work I had begun to realize how children follow the Spirit.

“Me, I am convinced it is the truth,” said M. Bouc, becoming more and more enamoured of his theory.

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.

It is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed by someone wiser than oneself.

Both philosophy and literature have helped me to put things into perspective. They gave me the strength to be myself. I found colleagues, I felt understood through hardships in life. When I was able to express myself and be in touch with great thinkers, I would always feel safe.

You must forgive me for continually coming back to the same thing; but I believe in the logical development of everything we see and feel through the study of nature and turn my attention to technical questions later.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

Meditation helped me to access the same thing my writing did: my intelligence and my instincts beyond the turmoil that inhabited the forefront of my mind.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

And I have always had an especially great desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to see my way clearly in my actions, and to go forward with confidence in this life. It is true that, so long as I merely considered the customs of other men, I found hardly anything there about which to be confident, and that I noticed there was about as much diversity as I had previously found among the opinions of philosophers. Thus the greatest profit I derived from this was that, on seeing many things that, although they seem to us very extravagant and ridiculous, do not cease to be commonly accepted and approved among other great peoples, I learned not to believe anything too firmly of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom; and thus I little by little freed myself from many errors that can darken our natural light and render us less able to listen to reason. But after I had spent some years thus studying in the book of the world and in trying to gain some experience, I resolved one day to study within myself too and to spend all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths that I should follow.

There is a time when you just take a walk.. ..you walk in your own landscape.. .It has an innocence that is kind of a grand feeling.. .Somehow I have the feeling that old man Monet might have felt like that, just simple in front of things, or old man Cézanne too.. .I really understand them now.

I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby