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

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

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.

You base your faith on experience, your faith is

The world is won by those who let it go.

The secret isn’t that you’re not being told. The secret is that you’re not able to hear.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties – of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.