Quotes

"Everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

"You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work... Be even-tempered in success and failure."

"How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?"

"For your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself."

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."

"When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him."

"Change is the law of the universe. You can be a millionaire, or a pauper in an instant."

"Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?"

"Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say that we devise their misery. But they themselves---in their depravity---design grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns."

"Well, every day is all there is."

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

"Death is as sure for that which is born, as birth is for that which is dead. Therefore grieve not for what is inevitable."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year."

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

"The trouble is, you think you have time."

"Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me... I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass."

"A person who is not disturbed by the incessant flow of desires—that enter like rivers into the ocean, which is ever being filled but is always still—can alone achieve peace."

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

"When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain... Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"For the one who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his very mind will be the greatest enemy."

"The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

"A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.'"

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance."

"The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die; nor having once existed, does it ever cease to be. The soul is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval."

"Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make."

"In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he perhaps would never have seen in himself."

"God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions."

"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."

"I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself."

"No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good... Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is."

"What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives."

"I don't know Who—or what—put the question... But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone-or Something-and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful."

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God."

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable... The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."