Interior Designer and Decorator

The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.

What a wonderful power the machine gives you. But is it going to dominate you? This statement of what the need and want is must come from you, not from the machine, and not from the government that’s teaching you, not even from the clergy. It has to come from one’s own inside. And the minute you let that drop, and take what the dictation of the time is, instead of the dictation of your own eternity, you have capitulated to the devil, and you’re in hell.