“The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.”

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Democracy is never a final achievement. It is a call to an untiring effort.

For every disciplined effort, there is a multiple reward.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.