“Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.”

I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

If you love me as you say you do, she whispered, ‘make it so that I am at peace.

Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Everything intelligent is so boring.

Whatever our fate is or may be, we have made it and do not complain of it.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.

Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind.

Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

Some of the greatest moments in life come from moments that are incomplete.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure a musical solution. The more rapid and complete the solution, the greater the musical talent of the doctor.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.