“Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.”

I never discuss discussions.

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

The myths have always condemned those who ‘looked back.’ Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.

It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

That’s more important even then what their background is or what they’ve done before, how good they are, how new they are or whatever. All that stuff is really secondary to just getting along with the person.

The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

But coming home that day, walking downhill with a panorama of valley and hills before me, I turned my gaze inward, and what I saw, stopped me in my tracks.

Sometimes bad things have to happen before good things can.

Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion.

No beer before 5 p.m., wait… did I just say that?

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime.