“The fact is I don’t lead a simple enough inner life. I indulge in excesses, bacchanalia of the spirit. Perhaps I identify too much with everything I read and study. Someone like Dostoevsky still shatters me.”

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

Suffering has always been with us; does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.

Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

And now that I don’t want to own anything any more and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.

How rash to assert that man shapes his own destiny. All he can do is determine his inner responses.

Sometimes my day is crammed full of people and talk and yet I have the feeling of living in utter peace and quiet. And the tree outside my window, in the evenings, is a greater experience than all those people put together.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned.

Religious questions have often led to wicked and impious actions.

And it’s not hard to understand why in families across the land,

For there is a VOID in things; a truth which it will be useful for you, in reference to many points, to know; and which will prevent you from wandering in doubt.

The sum of all sums is eternity.

What a wonderful thing it is to have a good friend. He identifies your innermost desires, and spares you the embarrassment of disclosing them to him yourself.

It is wisdom to think upon anything before we execute it.

I carry you do deep inside my heart that with every heartbeat I hear an echo of your name.

Life is good, after all…and that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland.