“The fact is I don’t lead a simple enough inner life. I indulge in excesses, bacchanalia of the spirit. Perhaps I identify too much with everything I read and study. Someone like Dostoevsky still shatters me.”

If one finds the strength to deal with small things, one finds it to deal with the large ones as well.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.

We have to fight them daily, lake fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.

Life cannot be captured in a few axioms. And that is just what I keep trying to do. But it won’t work, for life is full of endless nuances and cannot be captured in just a few formulae.

I would be so exhausted by my determination that I had no strength left to do the actual work.

Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day.

I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.

I don’t think I have nerves of steel, far from it, but I can certainly stand up to things. I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

The more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

If one burdens the future with one’s worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.

I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream…and life continues.

It is the only thing we can do. Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate that we add to this world makes it sill more inhospitable

That I should die next week, I would still be able to sit at my desk all week and study with perfect equanimity, for I know now that life and death make a meaningful whole.

Such words as ‘God’ and ‘Death’ and ‘Suffering’ and ‘Eternity’ are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.

So he asked the Iranians to come in and help.

The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity.

Although my father is English, I was brought up in Australia.

But I don’t believe it comes at the expense of the Middle East.

Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so

Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible?

Kinds hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one Have limits to its mercy; God has none.

The Iranians should just stay away from us.