If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.

We can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.

Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.

Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.