“I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.”

Life is a useless passion.

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.

Prayer is a very precious medicine, one that certainly helps and never fails, if you will only use it.

Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.

It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature.

We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong – this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.

Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.