When you think night and day and every moment only of pleasing me, things will be very easy for you.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.

In the chapel you prayed to be a saint and now I will make you a god.

I am afraid of death. I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give my life.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.