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

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.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Work hard in silence, let success be your noise.

Work hard in silence, let success be your noise.

Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance, and beautiful silence.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – imperfection – and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.

If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!