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

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 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.

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.

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.

After each creative act one has to be sustained by one’s strength of character, by a moral sense, by I don’t know what, lest one tumble.

I’m afraid I did not pray hard enough last night.

That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.

The sum of all sums is eternity.

What a wonderful thing it is to have a good friend. He identifies your innermost desires, and spares you the embarrassment of disclosing them to him yourself.

It is wisdom to think upon anything before we execute it.

I carry you do deep inside my heart that with every heartbeat I hear an echo of your name.

Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.

You can call on each other / and count on each other … / because each other / is all you have.

You will not be a chip the richer.

There is always more to tell.