“There’s something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.”

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.

One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.

The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance – the revolt of the soul against the intellect.

Never was I power thirsty, or trying to control everyone. I believed in educating everyone, so they could all get to the position I was at.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s. And in the office, that order is reversed.