“The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.”

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

The study of truth requires a considerable effort – which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge – despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.

We cannot afford to lose the Negro. We have urgent need of all and more. Let us therefore turn our efforts to making the best of him.

Being real is effortless, my child, because it means we’ve embraced exactly who we are.

Promise had made a bond with efforts! Sadly, ego came in between them.

For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance

Good habits take effort to develop, but once you have them, everything is easy.

Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.

You ask what I’ve been doing all this time as if surviving wasn’t much of an effort.