A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you w… - Maurice Maeterlinck

Why not admit that it is not our paramount duty to weep with all those who are weeping, to suffer with all who are sad, to expose our heart to the passer-by for him to caress or stab? Tears and suffering and wounds are helpful to us only when they do not discourage our life.

We have taken for a long time a rather foolish pride in believing ourselves to be miraculous beings, unique and wonderfully open to chance, probably fallen from another world, without clear ties to the rest of life and, in any case, endowed with an unusual, incomparable, awful ability. It is far preferable to be nowhere near so prodigious, for we have learned that prodigies soon vanish in the normal evolution of nature. It is much more consoling to observe that we follow the same path as the soul of this great world, that we have the same ideas, the same hopes, the same trials, and — were it not for our specific dream of justice and pity — almost the same feelings. It is much more calming to assure ourselves that, to better our lot, to utilize the forces, the opportunities, the laws of matter, we employ methods exactly the same as those that the soul uses to illuminate and order its unruly and unconscious areas; that there are no other methods, that we are in the midst of truth, that we are in our rightful place and at home in this universe molded by unknown substances, whose thought is not impenetrable and hostile but analogous or apposite to our own.

The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.