“Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.”

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

To know the world, one must construct it.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.

One love, one heart, one destiny.

It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

You have a destiny to fulfill. There’s a calling on your life, an assignment that only you can accomplish.

Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny.

Never let other people’s opinions of you determine your destiny.

You can’t be passive and reach your destiny.