“Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.”

A man thinks he owns things, and it is he who is owned.

Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

The capacity to get free is nothing; the capacity to be free is the task.

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.

Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.

Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.

Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.

We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

I can’t expect others to share my virtues. It’s good enough for me if they share my vices.

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.