From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair. РAndr̩ Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1925

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. – Isaac Newton (1642–1727), spoken the evening before his death

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it. – Goethe

We should scarcely desire things ardently if we were perfectly acquainted with what we desire. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld