“Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences.

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Nothingness haunts Being.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

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

It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Your judgement judges you and defines you.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

The poetry of earth is never dead When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide I cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.

There are remedies for all things but death.

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

Dead men will tell you, never stand in the way of a determined woman.

For love, even god was willing to die.

Wealth, a friend, a wife, and a kingdom may be regained; but this body when lost may never be acquired again.

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.