“Profound optimism is always on the side of the tortured.”

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.

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

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.

God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.

Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.

I wished for nothing beyond her smile, and to walk with her thus, hand in hand, along a sun warmed, flower bordered path.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.