“Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.”

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

To know the world, one must construct it.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

I never want to look back on life and say I wish I did something, and I don’t want anybody else to do that.

What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.

Work is doing it. Discipline is doing it every day. Diligence is doing it well every day.

Money… is like a beautiful thoroughbred horse – very powerful & always in action, but unless this horse is trained when very young, it will be an out-of-control & dangerous animal when it grows to maturity.

We should think of those who were famous for their good deeds or their bad deeds; did their fame raise them one single degree in the sight of Allah. Did it win them a reward that they had not already won by their actions during their life?

If your purpose is to liberate yourself and others into love and freedom, then you should do whatever magnifies the love and freedom in your life and in the lives of whom your actions affect.

Liberty is no heirloom. It requires the daily bread of self-denial, the salt of law and, above all, the backbone of acknowledging responsibility for our deeds.

People want to psychoanalyze me, but the fact is, I’m not that complicated. I’m pretty straightforward. And I’m not all that self-reflective, because I tend to be a doer.