A hundred facts testify to how great an extent the East was mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of our era. - Romain Rolland

There are some dead who are more alive than the living." "No, no! It would be more true to say that there are some who are more dead than the dead." "Maybe. In any case there are old things which are still young." "Then if they are still young we can find them for ourselves.... But I don't believe it. What has been good once never is good again.

In the great philosophy of Brahma, such violent turns of the scale are quite unknown. It embraces vast stretches of time, cycles of human ages, whose successive lives gravitate in concentric circles, and travel ever slowly towards the center....

Christophe fancied that on the day of the Creation the Great Sculptor did not take very much trouble to put in order the scattered members of his rough-hewn creatures, and that He had adjusted them anyhow without bothering to find out whether they were suited to each other, and so every one was made up of all sorts of pieces; and one man was scattered among five or six different men; his brain was with one, his heart with another, and the body belonging to his soul with yet another; the instrument was on one side, the performer on the other. Certain creatures remained like wonderful violins, forever shut up in their cases, for want of anyone with the art to play them.