In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.