Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

We want to have certainties and no doubts- results and no experiments- without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only thorough experiment.

Special knowledge is a terrible disadvantage.