“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.”

“Where the insider's engagement with the discipline's concepts and practices is combined with the moral distance maintained by the outsider one has reason to look for the emergence of a historiography that is both critical and effective.”

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

“Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.”

“Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;
Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,
Frozen by distance.”

“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog -- the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”

“These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself.”

“The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.”

“If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.”

“The distance is nothing when one has a motive.”