“What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.”

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast – or else there is nothing at all.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

I said to myself, ‘I want to die decently’.

In love, one and one are one.

Existence is an imperfection.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

You are — your life, and nothing else.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it’s urgency.

It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Existence is prior to essence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

The greatest disorder of the mind is to let will direct it.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

For my part, I think that to a man of spirit there is no other aim and end of his labours except the labours themselves.

We do not heal in isolation. When we reach out and connect with one another—when we tell the story, name the hurt, grant forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship—our suffering begins to transform.

It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

There is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books.

Your soul is like fresh snowfall. And I want to be the one that leaves an imprint through it with each step that I take deeper into the depths of who you truly are.