“It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy – from lack of character.”

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

The myths have always condemned those who ‘looked back.’ Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.

It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

It’s not easy that everything you do, everybody has to come in and critique it and give their opinion. Sometimes it does help me and sometimes it hurts me as a person. That’s life. I have feelings.

My dear, old age is like an airplane flying in a storm. Once you’re in it there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop a plane, you can’t stop a storm, you can’t stop time. So you might as well take it easy, with wisdom.

Sometimes its easier to focus on the pain you’ve felt. Instead, think of the strength you’ve gained.

Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you’d rather not go.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well, two or three times, will make your family rich for life?