“If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.”

I never discuss discussions.

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

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.