“What an old maid I’m getting to be. Lacking the courage to be in love with death!”

Faith assuages, guides, restores.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper – both of us – in ecstasy!

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

Human beings are made up of flesh and blood, and a miracle fiber called courage.

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.

Courage conquers all things: it even gives strength to the body.

Happy are those who dare courageously to defend what they love.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

You’re an intelligent person of great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I’m an intelligent person with no moral character at all, so I’m in an ideal position to appreciate it.

No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage.